Strengths

Scotland’s specific strengths lie in wireless applications, financial software, embedded software and games development.

Scotland provides software solution technologies to a variety of industries, including financial services, life sciences, energy and the public sector.

Specific strengths include:

Skills and expertise

• There is a strong talent pool available, with professionals possessing programming skills including C++, VB COBOL, Java, C, etc
• 20 percent of all the 5/5* rated university researchers in the UK are in Scotland (Source: RAE 2008)
• Scotland’s universities have a broad span of world-class capabilities, ranging from low-level hardware design through networking and middleware, to wetware, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction and social informatics
  

Supportive infrastructure

• Software ‘pooling’ alliances are being formed by Scotland’s universities whereby they align their research strategies
• The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SISCA)  has been cited as a world-leading cluster of researchers to rival other world-class leading researchers, such as those in Boston, Pittsburgh, Kyoto and Silicon Valley

Cost-competitive

• Software development in Scotland can be carried out at comparably reduced rates than other global centres
• Scotland has low barriers to entry and a business support infrastructure that ranks with some of the best in the world