Romanian trains are not comfortable, especially in winter in the middle of the night. But it was on the journey from Cluj-Napoca to Timisoara, across a remote corner of Transylvania, that investment banker Warren Creighton had his epiphany. “I suddenly realized my life’s mission was to help the Romanians,” says Creighton. “They are such talented people, but so poor.” Creighton had reached Romania in 1990 at the end of a global tour in search of a new direction after ending both his marriage and his job as vice-chairman of Memphis-based Union Planters Bank. Romania, too, had hit a low. Less than a year earlier, Romanians had executed longtime dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena and begun the long journey back to democracy. Returning to the United States, Creighton, with support from businessmen in the Memphis area, set up a foundation for new businesses in Romania. Success eluded him until a serendipitous meeting with a computer science professor led Creighton to Bucharest’s Politehnica University. There he stumbled on a Romanian treasure trove-its software programmers.
For most of the peolpe, Romania is a mysterious country sandwiched between Hungary and the Black Sea and filled with impenetrable mountains. Some know Ceausescu was a terrible dictator, that this country was the haunt of the fabled Dracula and that Romania is the top choice for Americans wanting to adopt children. All true. What few appreciate is that tucked away on the eastern edge of the powder-keg peninsula that is the Balkans, Romania each year graduates some 5,000 software programmers. Many are world class. The Politehnica University of Bucharest claims its students ranked fourth among nearly 1,500 university teams competing at the 1999 world championships in programming, ahead of all the U.S. teams, including those from Stanford and Virginia Tech.
Now tech companies are starting to recruit Romanian programmers, as well as build Romanian development centers and manufacturing plants. Better still, these grads are cheap, as well as good. With the official unemployment rate hovering round 12%, the average wage for skilled computer scientists ranges from $500 to $3,000 a month. “Their capabilities,” says Creighton, “are beyond the average programmer in the U.S.” That’s hardly surprising. Most graduates receive six years training versus the standard four-year degree here in the States. Romania’s prowess in computer science is one of the few positive legacies from the communist era. The communists did lots of things terribly, but they continued the long Romanian tradition of promoting scientific education. A 16th century Romanian manuscript describing a technique for building rockets is tucked away in Bucharest’s dust-laden National History Museum. “Romania has what America needs, and we have what Romania lacks, marketing and PR,” says James Rosapepe, the U.S. ambassador to Romania.
In his embassy in Bucharest, tie askew, jacket off, his desk cluttered with files, the bearded Rosapepe may sound like a shill for the local chamber of commerce. But this former investment banker from Maryland knows whereof he speaks. According to a study done for the Information Technology Association of America, 1.6 million IT jobs will be created this year in the U.S. alone, of which roughly half will remain unfilled. “Romania is on the cusp of being the new India,” says Rosapepe. Creighton was far-sighted, because U.S. and European firms increasingly see Romania joining India, Ireland and Israel as an important source for programmers and computer scientists. Microsoft Corp. is expected to add 30 Romanian graduates to the 200 or so it already employs at its headquarters in Redmond, WA. Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, CA, which currently employs 30 programmers in its Bucharest office, wants to expand that number to 200 over the next two years, says Radu Enache, director HP Romania. “I see God’s hand in what we are doing,” says Creighton, who now has a Masters degree in theology and sees himself as much a missionary as head of a software firm. By year’s end, Creighton expects his Cornerstone Technologies BVI, headquartered in the British Virgin Islands, to employ 100 Romanians writing programs for U.S. firms.
One-sixth of the profits will fund Romanian orphanages and churches. Others are more hardheaded. “Mostly brains and cheap labor-that’s what we’re looking to Romania for,” says President John Marmureanu Jr. of Colt America Inc., a software company based in West Chester, PA. Marmureanu is one of numerous Romanians who came to the United States to work and now operates on both sides of the Atlantic. A year ago, says Rosapepe, the quickest way to make money in Romania was to get into the software business and set up a small business for western firms wanting to outsource. Now it’s the turn of the dot-com firms seeking customers both outside and within Romania. This spring San Francisco-based software developer Recognos Co. Ltd. teamed with Softwin Romania, a software developer in Bucharest, to set up a virtual project marketplace on the Internet. Their idea is to link Romanian companies with foreign firms wanting to exchange services and goods. Another dot-com wannabe, Bucharest-based Tronn Software is even working on plans for a Romanian online grocery service.
It isn’t just software firms who are mining this treasure. “What drives our industry is people, and they’re one of the hardest things to find,” says Daniel Perez, chief administrative officer with Solectron Corp., the Milpitas, CA-based contract manufacturer. Hence the firm’s migration to Timisoara, Romania’s most westerly large town. Solectron is operating and expanding there what promises to be the largest plant in Europe for assembling cell phones and other electronics. Rumors of other projects abound. The word in the business community is that SCI Systems Inc., Motorola Inc. and LM Ericsson Telephone Co. will shortly set up Romanian assembly plants. Sighted in Bucharest in late spring was a team from General Electric Co., including its top software executive from India.
Earlier this year, the World Bank Group hosted a conference in Washington, DC, entitled “Romania on the cutting edge of technology.” That’s a stretch. World Bank statisticians figure there are upward of 1,200 software companies in Romania that do about $150 million worth of business. Another 800 or so are involved in IT manufacturing, cabling and communications, with revenues around $240 million annually. But clearly technology offers Romania a chance to join the high-tech revolution. As Dan Garlasu, area manager for Cisco Systems Inc. in Romania says, “When I see Alan Greenspan and Al Gore saying on CNN that technology is the answer for a modern economy then I know Romania can succeed.” Whether a few thousand computer scientists can kick start Romania to prosperity is another matter. Ten years after the revolution that began in Timisoara (see “Remembering the Ceausescus,” page 88), Romania is a democracy with a fragile economy. Comparable in size to Oregon, with 23 million people, the country totters from one crisis to the next.
The wars in neighboring Serbia and Kosovo have taken their toll. The bombing of bridges across the Danube cost Romania millions of dollars a week in lost exports. Inflation is rampant. The leu, the national currency, changed hands at 2,000 to the dollar in the mid-1990s. Now it’s worth one-tenth that amount and still falling. A rumor this spring that the biggest mutual fund, Fondul National de Investitii, was about to collapse led to a run on Romania’s biggest state-owned bank, Banca Comerciala Romana. With reports of nearly 1,000 people storming one of the bank’s branches in Sibiu, the directors of the International Monetary Fund expediently delayed a vote on whether to extend a $540 million loan to Romania. The difficulties Romania faces become evident in a visit to the Bucharest Politehnica.
This is the largest technical university in Romania, with 22,000 students, of whom 2,500 are in computer science and systems control. A steady stream of gifted computer specialists sounds wonderful. But talk to Irina Athanasiu, a computer sciences professor at the university and a darker picture emerges. The state is cutting back on funding. Salaries are meager and the faculty cannot afford to hire junior professors or prevent them from taking better paying private-sector jobs. “There is no money, and it doesn’t matter who is in power,” says Athanasiu, who worries that, if the pattern continues, Romanian universities will lose their academic edge. Athanasiu has become another missionary in Romania’s IT cause. She’s trying to convince U.S. firms that they should equip special workshops and pay her gifted students to do research work in those workshops for them. A compelling saleswoman, she convinced Sun Microsystems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. to fund two workshops. This spring, money for a third workshop was invested by Motorola. IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard are expected to fund similar initiatives. For Motorola, which does $25 million in business inside Romania-mostly from selling imported cellular handsets and two-way radios-it’s a modest but sensible investment.
It will finance 15 students and expects to have 50 on staff in two years. They will supply software solutions based on digital signal processing technology for cell phones. It’s no coincidence that Paul Marino, the head of Motorola Semiconductor’s DSP Core Technology Center in Austin, TX, is Romanian. Until recently, U.S. investment was noticeably absent, amounting to probably not more than $586 million since the revolution, according to the Romanian Trade Registry as published by the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. That’s barely a tenth of what went into Hungary, which boasts impressive manufacturing plants established by the likes of IBM, or Poland, where contract manufacturer Flextronics International Ltd. recently began building a manufacturing facility in Gdansk. Like most ex-communist, Central European countries, Romania has had its share of fiascos. Millions of dollars from the United States were invested and lost in a plan for electronic stock trading because neither brokerages nor their customers had access to computers. Citigroup Inc. and tractor maker Case lost millions more in a scheme to modernize and replace old-style collective farming. Crime, if not rampant, is prevalent. Warning signs abound, telling visitors not to carry valuables or cash. Software piracy was a huge problem for much of the 1990s. “We’re not a nation of thieves,” insists entrepreneur Dan Dragoiu, president of Aris Electronic of Bucharest. “It’s not all of us.” True.
But in May the FBI opened a branch in Bucharest to crack down on organized crime. The official 11% to 12% unemployment rate is a national joke. Two-thirds of the population remain peasants or underemployed. Outside any city old men and women in groups of four or five try to cultivate vast fields using only hoes. Few can afford tractors in a country that formerly was Europe’s, and then Russia’s, bread basket. As Mircea Geoana, Romania’s ambassador to the United States, observes, “We’re not unlike the U.S. We have two economies. Only we have a really old economy surrounding tiny islands of technology.” For a visitor, the Romanian economy is something of a mystery. With gross domestic product equal only to $1,480 a person and the average wage reportedly a mere $100 a month, how come restaurants and bars do such a brisk trade? A summer concert featuring a Serbian pop star sells out, even though tickets cost $40 a seat.
Cell phones seem as ubiquitous in Bucharest as in Washington, DC. Cars clog city streets, yet gas costs 50 cents a liter. Three-bedroom apartments are advertised at $3,000 a month and office space lists at $36 a square foot. Who can afford them? A possible answer is that at least three economies are at work here. There’s the official one, with its minuscule average wage. Then there’s a huge black market, where wages for second jobs go largely unreported. Hot programmers get much of their work over the Internet and foreign employers reportedly remit funds directly into Cypriot banks. No questions asked. Finally, there’s the market for tourists and visitors. Americans and Western Europeans alike are fair game for fleecing in Romania. A 15-minute cab ride, particularly if it starts or ends at an airport, can easily cost $40 or more. Visitors are likely to be ripped off whether or not the taxi has a meter.
The western-style hotels aren’t much better-Hilton and Holiday Inn have Romanian properties. Rates are high-$225 and up for a room-and $4 for a 12-oz. Coke. As for those apartment prices, take them with a grain of salt, says Creighton. They’re aimed at unsuspecting Americans. With a streetsmart Romanian negotiator at your side, you can expect to rent for at least 50% below list. Ripping off Americans may earn a few quick bucks, but longer-term success can only come from building good relationships. The success Kepler Prodimpex, a software programming company based in Bucharest, has had with McDonalds attests to this. The golden arches are ubiquitous in Romania, and across Europe the fast-food chain uses disaster recovery programs based on Kepler’s software.
Kepler is a fascinating fusion of western marketing savvy and eastern bare-bones skills. Named for the famous mathematician and founded by a French IT manager, Kepler is housed in a dozen rooms of what was a computer school dormitory. The state no longer pays students’ board as well as tuition-that was a luxury only communism could afford. So, in exchange for computers, teaching help and some rent, Kepler gets low-cost office accommodation in the converted dorms. Thanks to its French connection, Kepler landed contracts from McDonalds in Paris, which in turn recommended the firm to McDonalds in four other countries. Kepler typically charges between 50% and 75% of what its western European competitors bill and works under fixed-price contracts. What strikes a visitor is Kepler’s work attitude. French is mandatory and the office walls are plastered with notices reminding staffers that the customer is always right. Another surprise: Staffers own shares in Kepler. “We like the idea of investing,” says a beaming Camelia Milu, Kepler’s technical manager. Enlightened management is rare in Romania. Accord Group, an executive search firm based in Andover, England, recently polled 35 international firms, including Cisco, Alcatel, Xerox and Philips, about their Romanian operations. The study praised Romania’s IT skills but blasted management capabilities-too emotional, unstable and unreliable. Warns Accord: Don’t rely on contracts, even if signed by the government, be prepared to spend heavily on training and expect high inflation and taxes. What’s ahead for Romania? Few think the country will slip into the Balkan quagmire and become another wartorn disaster area. But the picture isn’t rosy. After three years of wrenching recession, Romania probably reached bottom late last year. Since then GDP has begun to increase modestly. An invitation to apply for membership in the European Union means that if Romania meets certain criteria and joins it could receive close to $1 billion in loans and grants from the EU, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund over the next few years.
But most businessmen worry about what their politicians will do. Take taxes, for example. “Taxes on salaries are way too high,” says Vlad-Florian Tepelea, president of Anis, the Bucharest-based national association of software companies. For each $1 paid to a worker, every employer must pay the government an extra $1.50. Few start-ups can easily afford to comply. “It’s difficult to believe all the guys working for government are either idiots or evil,” says Aris Electronic’s Dragoiu. But like other businessmen, he wonders. In Romania, party comes before country, and many of the top government jobs remain controlled by hangers-on from the Ceausescu era. Dragoiu is an entrepreneur and typical of Romanian businessmen who have learned to prosper in spite of the government. Graduating from the Bucharest Politehnica in 1985, he went to work in one of the state-run television factories. A year after the revolution, he set up his own firm and, through an emigre contact, landed a contract to be the sole distributor for Bull Worldwide Information Systems, the Paris-based computer maker. Along the way, Dragoiu added modems from Boca Research Inc. of Boca Raton, FL, and video boards from Hercules Computer Technology Inc., now part of Guillemot Corp. of Montreal. Things improved when he qualified as an Intel Corp. certified IT specialist, quit the reseller business, with its razor thin margins, and became a networking consultant. Today, Dragoiu operates a seemingly prosperous small business building programs and equipment based on Intel solutions in an industrial park south of Bucharest, where he gets a break on customs and tariffs. His target: corporate users. But, in his view, the business climate “is still lousy.” Without effective government, problems go unsolved. “In my $60,000 car, I still have to go over the same potholes as the guy driving a $1,000 car,” says Dragoiu. “It will take 10, 20, maybe 30 years before we sort out the infrastructure mess.” This much is clear. Whatever success Romania achieves will be due in large measure to its bountiful supply of youthful software programmers. As Warren Creighton likes to say, “The Romanians may be poor, but not in thinking. They have ambition.” ( By Paul Gibson. Freelance business and technology writer based in Whispering Pines, NC. He can be contacted at: paulgibson@earthlink.net )
GABRIEL BOGDAN IONESCU: The Romanian Hacker Genius
The District Attorney Office in Como, Italy, is interested in hiring a 22-year old Romanian hacker who is serving a 3-year in prison sentence for electronic fraud, to help it catch online criminals. The hacker has deeply impressed the Italian media and the professors at the Polytechnic University of Milano (Politecnico di Milano) with his intellect. Gabriel Bogdan Ionescu, 23, is currently incarcerated at the Bassone Penitentiary in Como, a city in northern Italy.
He was arrested in his parents’ house in Craiova, Romania, by the Romanian D.I.I.C.O.T. (the Direction for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism). He was subsequently extradited to Italy to face charges of computer electronic fraud, where he was sentenced to three years behind bars.The young hacker was found guilty for helping instrument an identity theft attack that involved cloning the website of the Italian Post Office and siphoning money from compromised accounts.
However, Bogdan Ionescu is no average hacker. In 2007, the Romanian won the gold medal at the Balkan Olympiad in Informatics (BOI) and was accepted without an exam at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. Faced with the prospect of spending the next three years of his life behind bars in Italy, the hacker did not give up his dream of following the courses of a specialized university. Therefore, in October 2008, the Italian authorities allowed him to take the admission exam at the Faculty of Informatics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milano, knowing little of the surprise that awaited them. The young cyber-criminal finished the test in record time, one hour and 20 minutes, and obtained the highest score in the history of the Faculty, prompting the Italian media to praise him and call him “the little informatics genius.” Now, the hacker sustained his first two exams as a student of the Faculty, obtaining the maximum score at both of them. “He’s not just the best in his generation. He’s probably the best on the planet,” Pierluigi della Vigna, one of his professors, commented in the local media.
After finishing the “informatics elements” and “mathematical analysis” tests in significantly less time than normally required, the hacker said that he was prepared to take any exam at any time. According to Corriere della Sera, one of the most important Italian publications, the Romanian hacker has been given the opportunity to jump barricades and put his exceptional talents to good use. Way-Log, a company that specializes in monitoring and intercepting online criminal activity, has extended a part-time job offer to the hacker. The company has been contracted by the Italian government to assist authorities with investigating and preventing online crimes, which are increasingly common in Italy. In order for this to be possible, the Como Tribunal has to allow for him to be moved out of the penitentiary and into house arrest. A hearing in this respect is scheduled f”We’re very confident.
Cornel Dinu, Romania’s general consul in Italy, commented for Jurnalul National, a Romanian newspaper, that “Important Italian publications and TV stations are contacting me to ask about Bogdan. The fact that the media here are presenting the exceptional intellectual qualities of this boy and supports our efforts to obtain a reprieve or at least move him to house arrest, can only be beneficial for his future.” He also pointed out that this was not the first job offer an important company had extended to Bogdan Ionescu.
MANOLE RAZVAN CERNAIANU (aka TinCode)
Another romanian Hacker called “TinKode” was arrested for hacking NASA and Pentagon servers. Romanian authorities believe that they busted a notorious hacker Tinkode, who gave trouble to government and military websites by exposing their vulnerabilities. The 20-year old Romanian hacker from Timisoara , named as Manole Razvan Cernaianu detained by Romanian authorities for hacking into NASA and Pentagon computer systems ,exposed the SQL injection vulnerabilities. “The same procedure, the accused and compromised web server belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)” reads a statement of the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT)
“The accused is also satisfied that the task of the unauthorized access, launching attacks on the system and the website belonging to the U.S. Government, that the Department of Defense – Pentagon” The DIICOT prosecutors are currently collaborating in the investigation with the American judicial authorities – NASA representatives and the FBI. “TinKode..He is a very talented guy ( somebody write in a blog ) …He is interesting and has an outstanding personality. He is not ordinary. He has found a lot of vulnerabilities in many web sites. Tinkode was included in Google’s january-march 2011 Hall of Fame, but now is arrested.” Sony Hacker said in his official blog about the arrest. He has 20 years old and jail for TinKode not the best place. Yes, sometimes people can do mistakes (not a critical), but we all people (if we are people) and we can understand this and forgive. He is a talanted guy and he can have a good future. Jail – it’s not a good future. “Serial Hacker”? What is this? It’s a Serial Killer, who kill a lot of people? Not. Yes, he found the sql inj on some sites, but i know he did not want to do bad things. It’s not his full fail. It’s full fail of administrators of those sites. What to do with TinKode? “Use the Button Thanks” and let him go home ” …..