Key facts about the country:

Population: 23 million

Language: Romanian

Capital: Bucharest

Key development centres: Bucharest

Romania is the second largest country in the Central-Eastern European region. It has been involved in offshore software development for over 10 years and is a popular destination for French, German and Dutch companies.

Like other European destinations Romania offers a Western-oriented culture. In addition it is a member of the European Union meaning it is governed by many of the same laws as the UK.

Romania runs an effective, high-quality education system where computer science is a popular degree subject. Indeed like neighbouring Poland, Ukraine and Russia, it claims that most of its programmers hold a science, technology, engineering or maths degree. Thanks to their secondary school education most young Romanians do speak some English. Programming is also considered an attractive career as currently employees working in IT pay less tax than colleagues in other professions.

Outsourcing your software development to Romania can deliver substantial savings compared to in-house development or outsourcing in the UK. In fact some projects can be run more cheaply in Romania than they can in India or Russia.

As a European country, Romania is in a similar timezone to Western and Southern European countries making it easy to manage suppliers and to organise business trips.

The Romanian government has injected considerable resource into its IT sector, helping to build business parks and encouraging students to pursue programming skills.

Employee attrition rates are also low in Romania and compare very favourably to some traditional destinations.

As part of the European Union, Romania adheres to the Intellectual Property laws of the Union, which are very similar to those in most Western countries. Consequently Intellectual Property theft is not a main worry of businesses outsourcing to Romania.