SAN FRANCISCO, California – on Sept 18 U.T.Gem conference was held to showcase Ukraine’s tech sector. In total, over 500 participants attended, among whom were Ukrainian and American investors, large technology companies, and startups of different stages.
U.T.Gem conference
Ukraine Tech Gem was an international technology conference where top tech names and US business giants came to meet their Ukrainian peers. It was a day full of dynamic keynotes, investor opportunities, company expos & pitches, cutting-edge tech solutions built in Ukraine.
Konstantin Vasyuk, IT committee coordinator at the European Business Association in Kyiv, giving his comments on the event told to The Kyiv Post “Ukrainian IT firms are at a stage where they are making full-cycle products, rather than just programmers writing the code. Now, we are making complex solutions for customers, sometimes costing as much as $1 billion.” Answering the question about the main aim of the event he said, “We decided to make an investment in our own country,” adding that U.T. Gem helped present Ukraine as the brain basket of Europe.
Moreover, there were discussed issues of IT cooperation intensification, in particular, the establishment of R&D centers of the world IT corporations (Intel, Microsoft, Google) in Ukraine that already includes those for Siemens, Samsung Electronics, Huawei, Gameloft, Crytek and many others. Apart from this, another discussion aspect was the opening of Ukraine’s IT Center in the Silicon Valley.
The event was triggered by a strong accent on IT outsourcing in Ukraine, which has become one of the most efficient and cost-effective IT outsourcing markets in Europe with the local outsourcing sector set to reach $4 billion in value by 2016. In addition, the IT industry in Ukraine was growing by 27% annually during previous years with 250,000 IT specialists in the country to-date, the number that is expected to grow to 350,000 by 2020.
