THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY IN ROMANIA

The IT industry began its expansion in Romania in the 60's, alongside the beginning of the FELIX main frame computers manufacturing, initially French. At that time there had been founded high profile education and research institutions, as well as a national network of territorial software development centers.

Soon after 1990, Romania connected to the new technologies and the Western hardware and software companies began to operate in Romania. The old state-owned companies were overtaken by the new private ones, this sector becoming the only domain of almost 100% private ownership in Romania.

According to the data released by the Romanian Government, there are now about 2,000 companies doing business in the IT field, employing close to 100,000 specialists, as there are about 8,000 new graduates from the Romanian IT schools every year.

In the recent years, due to the outstanding development of telecommunications and the internet, Romanian companies operating in the Information Technology market offered almost all the available world services.

As a consequence of Romania's comparative advantage of highly skilled and low labor costs in the software field, many Western companies have taken an interest in either investing or setting up partnerships with Romanian software companies.