India, Japan IT ties get going

Business relations between two countries can be said to have really arrived when small and medium enterprises on both sides start interacting directly with each other. India-Japan cooperation in IT services can be said to have started rolling too.

OPTiS Information Services India Pvt Ltd, the fully-owned subsidiary of Japanese training and software service company I-poc, has initiated plans to go in for offshored software development in the embedded technology and applications space.

OPTiS claims that late last year it became the first Japanese IT services company to open a development centre in India (that is not including a captive centre that a major like Sony may have).

It has 70 engineers working in Japan at the client sites and 30 at its Bangalore facility. It has however been active in India for several years now in the training area through the training division NAVIS.

For the Japanese Yen 300 million ($2.9 million) turnover I-poc in India, it is "a transition from training to offshoring", said Rajkumar Sambandam, CEO and director of OPTiS. He added that the move was dictated by the emerging opportunities in India-Japan's collaborative work in software services as a result of three developments.

One, there is a growing need for software components among Japanese, especially in embedded technologies (these are essential today in consumer electronics in which Japan is a global leader); two, the growing need among Japanese for skilled engineers and three, the willingness now by Japanese companies to consider Indian software vendors.

Shuichiro Abe, CEO and director of NAVIS Nihongo Training Centre, said it has so far trained 160 Indian engineers in both soft skills like Japanese language and business custom and professional requirements like understanding Japanese IT specifications and compilation and engineering conversion.

The training business will continue and for it the company is targeting both individual and corporate customers.