June 9, 2008, Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia
In June, 2008, Arcadia, one of the leading software developers in St. Petersburg, has opened a regional department in Petrozavodsk (Republic of Karelia). With the new regional office, Arcadia will be able to use strategic advantages of the region, while local specialists will get excellent employment opportunities, providing them with professional development and adequate remuneration. It is planned that by the end of 2008 the regional office will hire 10-15 employees, but in future it can grow and offer more job opportunities.
The choice of this direction of business development was determined by a huge potential of Karelian region and Petrozavodsk for Arcadia. One of the main advantages of the region is its location: Karelia is situated close to St. Petersburg and Finland. As Arcadia is focused mainly on Scandinavian markets, this territorial, cultural and technological closeness will facilitate good understanding between company’s clients and software developers.
Still, the main advantage of the region is the high quality of IT education in Petrozavodsk State University (PetrSU), which is generally recognized as one of the best in Russia. At the same time, talented graduates of the university have rather narrow choice of employment opportunities. Most jobs can be found in local IT companies, regional manufacturers or work in the University. For really talented software developers, it is often rather hard to find an interesting, creative job which would give both good remuneration and career opportunities, possibility to use advanced technologies, etc. Besides, the number of free vacancies for software developers in Petrozavodsk is rather low, while manufacturing companies are often located outside the city.
Given all this, the new Karelian Center of “Arcadia” which is one of the leaders of St. Petersburg software market, opens unique opportunities both for talented graduates if PetrSU and for Arcadia itself. High skills and enthusiasm of Karelian software developers, together with Arcadia’s wide experience and high culture of software development technology will allow Arcadia to develop more software development projects for North European customers, providing at the same time interesting, well-paid job with good career opportunities for software developers in Petrozavodsk.
In addition to PetrSU, Arcadia, Inc. co-operates with other leading Russian universities. Thus, it is quite possible that the Karelian Center will be the first but not the last regional office of the company in Russia.