The U.S. market is one of Unikie’s greatest areas of interest. There is a huge shortage of IT talent in the USA. Solely in the area of California there are constantly more than 26 000 open software developer jobs. On the other hand, at the moment there are two places in the world where the innovations of the software industry take place: Silicon Valley and China. Unikie wants to offer its highly skilled people challenging jobs and, on the other hand, projects, where new and interesting things are done. The projects of clients in the USA offer both of these.
Unikie’s aim is to find productized solutions, such as to open the doors in the USA. Our goal is to gain more than half of the enterprise’s turnover in the USA in the future.
Decreasing Subcontracting in China and India – a Chance?
In the USA the offshore development is customary, i.e. the use of India and China in subcontracting of software development is, unlike Finland, well-known to every firm. Certainly, also we in Finland use low-cost countries for software development but not at all in the same scale as in the USA. Yet at the moment in the USA, to some degree, there exists the trend of moving software work back to the USA, away from subcontracting, thus following the example of Apple, Amazon and others.
In order to be able to respond to low-cost competition as well as reduction of subcontracting, we must have finished productizations , by the help of which our clients can have a flying start in their development, so to speak. Likewise the input/output has to be better than in low-cost countries, i.e. the know-how has to be of expert quality, so that we can manage in the competition. For example, basic web coding, software maintenance or development of subsequent versions are domains where we have no chances whatsoever agaist India or China. Instead, profound special know-how in a domain such as graphics & multimedia offers a chance.
Let’s Recruit the Best Talent
Our operations model in the USA is to offer clients skilled staff to work in the premises of a client and the rest of the work is done in Finland. The sale takes place mainly by the help of our own productizations, where 70% are completed and 30% are to be customized in a project according to the client’s needs.
The recruiting situation in the USA is practically unmanageable, because we vie for the same guys with brands a bit more sexy than we, like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, and we are not able to offer equally good perks or promotion chances. On the other hand, also start-ups attract people because Silicon Valley is full of stories of success which have all produced millionaires. Our chance is to locally find guys who are interested in our special know-how domain jobs and developing in these. On the other hand, we also have to find matured talent in Finland and elsewhere, who are ready to move to the USA as our men.
The aim is that our activity will spawn jobs in Finland. In the USA we have hardcore guys working in the client’s premises and acting as links to Finland, among other things managing the problems related to the time difference, so helping client. The rest of the workforce is in Finland, doing projects together with local experts.
Seppo Kolari, Chairman of the Board, founder
