Boeing said to be considering an investment in Petergof technology park

St. Petersburg State University rector Ludmila Verbitskaya and Russia's Minister for Information Technologies and Communications Leonid Reiman have recently met with the University's students to unveil plans for a real technology park in the vicinity of the University's facilities in Petergof. Five hectares of land outside the University's Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty has been earmarked for this purpose, but the estimated timeframe and funding for the technology park have yet to be approved. So far development is expected to start sometime in 2007. Much of the work to develop a construction strategy for the technology park will be handled by the company Tercom, whose president Prof. Andrei Terekhov is the chairman of the System Programming Department at the St. Petersburg State University. Major foreign companies, in particular Boeing, have expressed strong interest in building the technology park. A majority of skilled Petersburg-based IT specialists currently "work for the West", while local offices of foreign IT companies are often established on the premises of Russian universities.