"TietoEnator's strategy has been to serve key customers wherever they are operating. Our ambition is to combine world-class industry expertise, customer proximity and low-cost benefits. Our new Ostrava unit supports this by taking responsibility for those of our production activities where we can derive benefit from lower production costs," Pentti Heikkinen, Chief Operating Officer of TietoEnator Corporation, says.

TietoEnator already operates e.g. in China, Malaysia, Lithuania and Latvia. Last year TietoEnator made a comprehensive analysis of operating conditions in various countries to decide how it could best meet the need to produce programming services of high quality at lower cost. One result of this work was the decision to establish this new unit.

The Czech Republic was chosen because it combines lower production costs with geographical and cultural proximity. This contributes to more efficient project management and to avoiding the cultural and time zone difficulties compared with Asia, for example. In addition, TietoEnator already has excellent experience of working in the Czech Republic.

"We see that there is an ample pool of potential recruits for software development tasks in Ostrava with more than 2000 IT students in its two universities. Nowadays many of the graduates have to move for example to Prague to get work. We believe that TietoEnator can offer attractive opportunities for local IT professionals," Pentti Heikkinen says.

By setting up its own unit in Ostrava, TietoEnator ensures that it will continue to manage the entire value chain of the services it provides. Customer-specific experience and expertise can be moved to this unit, and the same methods and tools can be used. This also ensures that data security can be kept at the highest possible level. The unit will concentrate on mainstream technologies such as Java, Net, C++ and Oracle.