Cluj-Napoca
Cluj-Napoca is “the Heart of Transylvania” and with over 400,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan area, is the second largest city in Romania, after the capital Bucharest. With a history going back to Roman times, the city has always been a cultural and economic landmark with historically strong connections to Western Europe. Cluj is now an important business destination whose future relies on IT, engineering, financial services and other innovative industries.
Cluj is also a major academic centre, with over 100,000 students living in the city and has 11 universities, including the largest university in the country and a top-tier technical university. The city is popular with young people, who often make Cluj their home due to the wide array of career opportunities available to them. Cluj is a cosmopolitan European city with an increasingly diverse cultural life, which resulted in its selection as the European Youth Capital in 2015.
Cluj has a strong IT community of over 10,000 professionals and over 1,700 IT graduates per year with widely spread business domain knowledge and multi-language skills. This has led to the city being named among the top emerging locations worldwide for IT-BPO outsourcing (KPMG, 2009).
Among the highlights of the IT community, are the Cluj IT innovative cluster, which brings together over 30 companies, universities and other catalyst organisations. The city also hosts some of the largest events in Romania for IT professionals (i.e. ITCamp.ro, Romanian Testing Conference) as well as many student competitions and technology-driven communities (i.e. Java, .Net).
Cluj has a well developed infrastructure and the Cluj airport is the fourth busiest airport in the country, offering direct flights to many European cities.