Despite this, India takes a lion’s share in the global IT market, having a longtime experience in delivering outsourcing services. More than 2,75 million developers work in India while in Ukraine the talent pool is much smaller — 192,000. The attractiveness of this destination is mostly explained by a large and inexpensive pool of developers.
Geographic position/English level
If you have ever considered collaboration with an outsourcing vendor, you must understand the importance location plays. Constant communication with an outsourced team is inevitable if you want to stay aware of the development process and be confident that the result will meet your expectations. The time difference with Ukraine is more than convenient — 1 hour with Europe, and around 7 hours with the USA. Whereas, approximately 5 hours between India and Europe and 10 hours with the USA.
Being a democratic country with an active vector of European integration, Ukraine has made the English language compulsory in most of the schools and universities. Furthermore, almost every IT company offers free English courses for their employees, as a result — 80% of Ukrainian developers speak English, with 47% of them having an upper-intermediate level. English is also widely spoken in India, but not written. Therefore, you might encounter difficulties and misunderstandings reading a report from your vendor. Take also into account pronunciation, intonation and tone differences that vary a lot from Western.
Education level
The quality of services the country offers is strongly predetermined by the level of education of its citizens. According to 2015 statistics, the Ukrainians literacy rate is 99,8% with 70% having a secondary or higher education. 661 higher education institutions are currently educating 1,6 million students, investing in engineering faculties and STEM programs.
On the contrary, India has 620 exclusively technical institutions, which makes technical education the most desirable and developed one. Though, the level of education still remains not high, with 25% of Indians being illiterate.
IT company statistics
IT product and outsourcing companies, captive centers of global business form an overall number of 1,600 software development service companies currently operating in Ukraine, winning global industry awards such as GSA UK Awards, IT Europa Awards, Global Outsourcing 100, etc. Over 100 representatives of the Fortune 500 list of the most influential companies are customers of Ukrainian outsource companies (Volvo, Audi, Siemens, Lebara, Grammarly, etc).
In India, the IT industry is a key part of the economy that generated around $180 billion in 2019. The country takes third place in the world as to the number of startups. The National Association of Software and Service Companies reported that almost half of Fortune 500 companies outsource in India.
Data safety and insurance
According to HackerRank, Ukraine takes one of the top places in terms of security policies and technical safeguards. Data and intellectual property protection, conformity with the GDPR norms have become the main principle in delivering services of the Ukrainian software companies. While, India still faces a lot of security challenges, being a vulnerable country in terms of cyber-attacks and a lack of national-level architecture for cybersecurity.
