Kaufland Service IT HUB announced the opening of its second IT office in Sofia. The company expands its team to 110 employees who will develop software products and technologies for customers of more than 11 500 markets and over 400 000 employees of the Schwarz Group around the world.
Kaufland Service IT HUB started its activity in Sofia in 2017 after evaluating the IT sector and business environment of several European locations. The centre had opened with nine software specialists, but just a year later expanded to a team of 55 people, delivering IT solutions in the areas of SAP Basis, Java, SharePoint, BI, CA. With its second office, the engineering team has grown to 110 people and the company plans to double its workforce by the end of 2020.
According to Michail Petrov, CEO of Kaufland Service IT HUB Bulgaria, Sofia maintains the business of a global player with a turnover of 100 billion euro for 2018 offering innovative value added IT products and solutions to facilitate the development of the Schwarz Group’s overall activity – the retail.
Schwarz Group is the world’s fourth-biggest revenue retailer, with Kaufland, Lidl, and Handelshof retail chains.
Image source: Acronis Bulgaria
With an investment of BGN 1.2 million, the Singapore-based Acronis expands the operations of its European research and development centre in Sofia. The Bulgarian office will also open 130 new positions for engineers.
The centre in the Bulgarian capital opened in August 2018 and has been working in areas such as Cybersecurity, AI and Blockchain projects. The expansion of the R&D centre is related to the development of a new product – Acronis Total Protection (ATP) for proactive defensive technologies, controlled by an AI.
For the investment, Acronis Bulgaria received an A-class investment certificate from Emil Karanikolov, Minister of Economy. As a result, the company may take advantage of the privileges and relieves, envisaged in the Investment Promotion Act (IPA).
Acronis entered the Bulgarian market with the acquisition of the Sofia-based T-Soft and started its business with a team of 30 people. Almost a year later, 120 people work for the team of the company in Sofia. The international leader in cybersecurity and hybrid cloud solutions has more than 1000 workers around the world and provides its solutions in more than 150 countries. The products of the company are adapted in 20 languages and provide security for more than 500 000 companies and 5 million customers.
Financial Times (FT) moved to Sofia one more of its key teams in the field of development of technologies and products. The new department FT Specialist will develop in Sofia digital products for well-known brands of FT as Investor Chronicle, fDi Intelligence and The Banker. By the end of the year, there will be 30 new positions for software engineers, product managers, business analyzers and designers opened.
The team will be accommodated in the office of FT in the Bulgarian capital that officially opened at the beginning of 2019 with the department FT Core. FT Core supports the platforms and systems of FT.com. Among them are the subscription software, data domains, content publishing and distribution, etc.
The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading business news and information organisations with more than 900 thousand subscribers across print and digital products. It provides a broad range of services, including news, comments, data, and analyses.
Sofia was selected due to its location and fast access to Financial Times’s head office in London, as well as for its technology talent pool.
Sofia has been chosen as one of eight sites across the EU that will host the first European supercomputers. The new high-performing computing machine will be located at Sofia Tech Park.
The project is the largest EU investment in Bulgaria related to scientific infrastructure. It would cost 18 million euro, 12 million euro of which will be paid by Bulgaria and the European Commission will pay six million euro.
The supercomputer in Sofia will be capable of executing at least 4 million billion operations per second. The other 7 supercomputing machines will be located in Ostrava (Czechia), Kajaani (Finland), Bologna (Italy), Bissen (Luxembourg), Minho (Portugal), Maribor (Slovenia), and Barcelona (Spain).
The EU project is part of a pioneering continent-wide plan to compete with the USA, China, and Japan as major international players in supercomputing. The deployment of world-class supercomputing and data infrastructure should be completed by the end of 2020.
The eight sites that will host the world-class supercomputers will support Europe’s researchers, industry and businesses in developing new applications in a wide range of areas, such as designing medicines, fighting climate change, testing and simulations in the aviation and automotive industries, data analytics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and blockchain.