ESI Center Bulgaria to operate officially under the name ESI CENTER EASTERN EUROPE

Three years after the start, ESI Center Bulgaria is officially authorized to operate under the name ESI CENTER EASTERN EUROPE. During the meeting with media representatives Elena Schaiedt, director in European Software Institute (Spain), handed a certificate to ESI Center Bulgaria director George Sharkov to verify the Center had successfully completed the know-how transfer and had the capacity to offer services and operate under its new name.

ESI Center Bulgaria is to continue its independent operation and will spread out through the whole region. George Sharkov figuratively presented the process as a continuous climbing on the “IT competitiveness pyramid”. “Our efforts are focused in two main directions”, he said, “to turn ICT into a competitive and mature industry, which guarantees quality products and services on the market, and to “teach” the market to require quality from the companies. CMMI and IT Mark are the main methodologies for that. The second key direction is to prepare the consumers to use IT in their everyday activities – the ITcard certificate.” 

Knowledge forms the base of the IT competitiveness pyramid, the awareness that competitiveness depends on processes quality. 300 experts from 136 companies passed through courses and seminars, organized to make popular the leading quality models. Participants present companies from Bulgaria and the region– Armenia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia. Increased competitiveness (the second level of the pyramid), was reached by 174 professionals from 23 companies. 25 companies from Armenia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania officially started programs targeted at Software Process Improvement (SPI). Finally, the leaders, managed to get to the top. One Bulgarian company – MPS, was certified under CMMI ML2. Six companies from Armenia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania are at an advanced stage of the CMMI certification process.

Boris Krstanovich, representative of the BEAM ICT Alliance in Croatia, stressed the region should be positioned on the cooperation, trust and healthy concurrence basis. “One can build trust on quality, we in Croatia has identified ESI Center Bulgaria as the most trustful institution in the field of SPI”, said Krstanovich to the media. All mentioned results were achieved also thanks to the competitive advantage that ESI Center Bulgaria managed to mobilize the donor programs USAID (RCI, VEGA BTD), GTZ and EBRD BAS, to take part in joint regional projects. Their programs are mainly focused to improve the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs, “small settings”).