Oracle Romania’s management plans to open an office in Iasi are already past the early stages, with a team from the parent company already in Romania, which only has to decide on the office space now, the same sources said.
ZF called Oracle Romania’s boss Sorin Mandrutescu to confirm or deny the rumor about the opening of the office in Iasi and also wrote to the company asking for an answer. The answer was that Oracle does not comment on the statements about potential expansion plans.
It remains to be seen what services the employees in the new office will provide, whether it will become a support center for Oracle or for other customers.
Oracle’s move makes sense since after IT and outsourcing companies ‘conquered’ Brasov, Cluj and Timisoara over the last few years, Iasi has become the next market to `conquer’ for those looking to expand in this business.
Iasi is becoming a new center for IT and outsourcing companies, with Pentalog, Endava, Xerox, Amazon, Capgemini and XL World already there, where they can recruit from among the 65,000 students in nine universities, five of which public, the more than 1,000 IT-related graduates and about 1,500 graduates holding a foreign language or economics degree a year.
At least two more companies are now looking at Iasi as their potential destination for expansion, market sources say.
The things that could turn Iasi into the next go-to city for business in Romania are the investment the County Council promised to make in upgrading the local airport, which is already connected to eight cities abroad by direct flights (such as Vienna, London, Tel Aviv and Rome), the plan to establish an industrial park, the IT cluster that includes 45 entities and, maybe the most important, the much lower wages than in Bucharest for instance.
Oracle opened an office in Bucharest in 1995 and in 2004 started developing it into a center that provides services in 27 foreign languages to international customers. The company had 600 employees in 2006 and the number doubled by 2009. It is currently employing almost 3,000 people in Bucharest alone.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)