Life in Estonia

I ECONOMY AND BUSINESS

NICK DOBROVOLSKIY: We Will Grow Fast if We Get Good People Nick Dobrovolskiy is one of the founders of Parallels and the company’s Vice President of Desktop Virtualization. He also heads the Moscow cross-platform and Maltese R&D offices of Parallels.

Nick has been seen a lot in Estonia recently. He was part of the team that negotiated the move of Parallels to Estonia. Now an applicant for Estonian e-Residency, Nick says that Estonia did not oversell itself when they invited Parallels to open an office in Tallinn. During the last Latitude59, held in Tallinn on 14-15 May, we sat down with Nick Dobrovolskiy to discuss why they chose Estonia and what they plan to do here.

What made a big company like Parallels open an office in Estonia?

We started thinking about opening a new office only last year. We evaluated Germany, Latvia, Finland and other places, weighing the pros and cons.

Finally, it was a combination of many reasons.

Enterprise Estonia showed us that the business environment here is good. The Estonian government is doing great things to develop the IT sector, aiming to double the local IT population of 18 000 by 2020. This is important. It means that there are a lot of people who are interested that we do well.

Second, let’s face it: Estonia is geographically closer to our Moscow office. Last month I started one of my trips to Tallinn from my Moscow apartment. I flew in here, walked to the office in Ülemiste near the Tallinn Airport, worked the whole day and flew back, ending my day at my Moscow home again.

44

LIFE IN ESTONIA #38 I 2015 SUMMER

We knew right from the start that we had to bring some of our guys from the Moscow R&D centre to Tallinn. Due to its history, Tallinn is a good place for Russian-speaking people to live and work in. There are kindergartens, schools and other things you need for a normal life.

I just checked to see who have applied for these vacancies in Estonia. A lot of them are local, but there were a couple of Swedish and Finnish developers as well as one guy from Albania and another from Peru. It looked like those people were ready to relocate to Estonia.

Was there a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting the first employees from Moscow to Tallinn?

If good candidates come, we will be able to grow the Tallinn office to 100-150 people in the next 3-5 years.

Visas and residence permits were very easy to get. All the 20 staff members got permanent residency in less than a month, which is really impressive.

The first group of 20 has arrived, then. What’s next?

We already have another office ready for about 20 more employees. We have opened a number of vacancies and expect to hire 20 to 25 more people. But for us it doesn’t really matter if we hire them in Estonia, Moscow or Malta – we just need good people.

What exactly are your people doing in your Estonian office?

First I thought I would bring one specific team here, but after talking to people, I realized that it would be hard to convince one group of people to move to a different country. Then we looked for volunteers among our people to move to Europe.

So for example, from one team four guys out of seven decided to relocate in Tallinn. The others stayed in Moscow. They are still working together, only in different locations.

PARALLELS PRODUCTS Parallels Desktop for Mac. The easiest, fastest, and most powerful solution for running Windows on Mac without rebooting. The #1 choice of Mac users for over eight years, with more than five million copies sold.

Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition. The simplest and most powerful solution for delivering Windows and Windows applications to employees with Macs.

Parallels 2X Remote Application Server (2X RAS) is a leading solution for delivering applications and virtual desktops to any device and operating system.

Parallels Access. The fastest, easiest, and most reliable remote access to your desktop from anywhere. Access all your applications, files, and computers in one place, and use desktop applications as if they were designed for your mobile device.

Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). This plug-in makes SCCM 2012 the most robust platform for managing Mac computers by leveraging existing business skills, processes, and systems.

Now we have here the full range of everything related to Parallels cross-platform development: code writers, designers, mobile developers, testers and so on. We have four product lines and two of them are being developed in Malta now. All surrounding Parallels Desktop and Parallels Access is spread between Tallinn and Moscow.

Let’s talk about our universities.

Do you want to work with them to make our IT education better?

Yes, that is my intention. Let me tell you what we are doing in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Novosibirsk. The first thing is, that we send our employees to teach some classes.

Second, we organize and fund special research-oriented laboratories for talented, and more importantly, highly- scored students. The professor doesn’t need to be our guy. In some cases we have even funded business-classes like ‘How to create a company’. Right now we are extending this program with MOOC element sharing the knowledge of own faculty with external students.

We also have lots of internships. Students work on our premises, on various projects not

directly related to our products. They work in an environment and next to where real commercial developments are being made. They learn the ways and how to use different tools.

They study our processes. And the best of them get jobs here every year!

And then of course, better IT education. That’s where we will start investing our resources.

This is what we plan to do in Estonia as well.

It may start as early as the next school year. I can’t see why your universities and the government wouldn’t want that.

Yes, we felt welcomed in Estonia. We saw that we are and will be supported. That also made the decision to come here easier.

We have talked about the pros of Estonia and the opportunities here. Are there any cons?

Your social tax for one thing. There needs to be a ceiling here, so that salaries can rise and people have more money to spend on other things. For a country it’s much healthier – it doesn’t just suck money from people and then distribute it. And you will get more businesses that want to grow.

The other thing is that if you really want to increase IT population here in Estonia, you need to get more youngsters interested in IT. So that more kids want to end up in IT industry. Seemingly your officials embark exactly on this road.

A lot of people in Estonia were involved in getting you to come to Estonia. Did you sense that?

So finally, is everything the way you were promised or did Estonia oversell itself?

Business-wise it goes as smoothly as it was promised. Visas, permits, renting a space, the quality of it and establishing a company – it all went as planned. So no, Estonia was not overselling itself.

We got the grant approved from Enterprise Estonia to support our move to Tallinn. Now we’re preparing the report to get the actual reimbursement and will see how smoothly it goes.

We also know that whatever the problem, we can ask help from Enterprise Estonia.

SUMMER 2015

I LIFE IN ESTONIA #38

45