Jul 3

Written by: Joel Orr
7/3/2007 

I'm in Israel right now, on my honeymoon. It's hard to find Israeli engineering technology. No, wait, I don't mean it that way; there is a lot of engineering software coming from this tiny country. There are names you'll recognize right away - Cimatron, Smarteam - and others with which you may not be familiar, such as Amdocs and Yedda.com, neither of which is particularly engineering-oriented, but both of which have products working in engineering firms worldwide.

No, what I mean is that these firms are so cool, so savvy, so web, that the fact of their being Israeli elicits no more than "so what?"

High tech is burgeoning in Israel. The country has cracked the marketing code. You may find out that many applications you use regularly are Israeli under the skin. Of course, many do not advertise that fact; anti-semitism is alive and well in the world today.

But if you are looking for a location for a development center, with easy access to talent - talent that is not as cheap as Indian or Russian, but not as expensive as American - check out Israel. You'll find an English-speaking workforce with state-of-the-art competencies.