San Francisco, Calif. — Exigen Group and Micro Focus International Ltd. (Micro Focus®) announced from the 2003 Software Outsourcing Summit (www.soft-outsourcing.com) a joint commitment of over $1 million in resources to develop a standardized curriculum intended to train a new generation of offshore programmers on COBOL, Java and application maintenance within Eastern European regions. The initiative helps support the growing demand for engineers and developers as outsourcing by U.S. and Western European companies increases to the region.
The new initiative, which for Micro Focus is a continuation of its already established Academic Grant Program, commits more than $1 million in software licenses and training resources between the two companies. Exigen Group offers several universities in the Baltics curriculum and tools to meet the growing needs of teachers and students. New participating universities are targeted within Riga, Latvia; Vilnius, Lithuania; St. Petersburg, Moscow and Novosibirsk, Russia; Kiev, Ukraine and; Minsk, Belarus.
"The support received by industry leaders like Exigen and Micro Focus means a great deal to the technical faculty and students in Latvia," said Maris Elerts, general director of the Latvian Development Agency. "Cooperation between government and international firms like this is a great win for everyone involved. Our information technology professionals get access to expert tools and instruction for highly demanded skills, and our partners get access to excellent, multi-lingual professionals prepared to work on global initiatives."
"Gartner research has identified a growing trend of enterprises extending the 'life' of legacy applications to ensure return on investment during tough economic times. With many of the legacy application programmers heading towards retirement, organizations will turn to offshore providers to deliver low cost ongoing application support, said Ian Marriott, research director of Gartner Research. "The quality of the university systems in Eastern Europe is part of its strength and its attraction as an offshore service location. Service providers who successfully target these institutions to build resources, will help to underpin the growth of the countries IT development and access high quality graduate output from the universities".
The use of offshore development resources creates unique challenges and opportunities for IT and software providers. Strong analysis, testing, repository and collaboration technology isn't enough – we must also provide more trained COBOL professionals in the outsourcing regions of the future. Delivering legacy applications that reduce cost and increase business agility are key business imperatives today. Partners like Exigen, with a proven track record in Eastern Europe, help us to drive further innovations into our products for this marketplace," said Tony Hill, chairman and chief executive officer of Micro Focus.
Alex Poberezhsky, general manager of outsourcing of Exigen Group stated, "Our tools based upon Micro Focus Revolve lead to faster and higher quality for our knowledge transition and documentation stages of an outsourcing engagement. These tools combined with Exigen ServicePort provide our customers with business process on demand for application development, maintenance and production support with greater control, visibility and service levels than they can afford in-house."
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