As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, the IT outsourcing industry is slowly expanding despite the downturn. Outsourcers continuously seem to be aware of the advantages of outsourcing. But what location do you choose once you have decided to move your IT development to a service provider? And how important is the location, or should you focus more on the service provider?

This week’s post “The 10 Safest Places In The World For Outsourcing” by Bob Evans led to quite some discussion online. Or probably even more discussion was initiated by his last week’s post “The 10 Riskiest Locations In The World For Outsourcing”. The conclusion of both posts is that Poland is a safe have for outsourcing.

“The Shifting Geography of Offshoring” is the title of this year’s Global Services Location Index ™ by AT Kearney. And the title is self-explanatory. AT Kearney concluded that there are some dramatic changes in the attractiveness of offshore outsourcing locations. Especially a lot of Central  and Eastern European countries, among them Poland, dropped dramatically in the ranking. AT Kearney states that this is mainly due to the dramatic change in the conversion rates of the local currencies towards the US Dollar. Although I have always been a great fan of  yearly reports, this year I have some doubts. Especially because the currency rates are shifting quickly and like AT Kearney states this is less of an issue for Euro countries. This makes the conclusions of the report less applicable to European countries, and even worse, the index might not be valid any longer due to serious economic changes.