(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| India's NIIT Joint Venture Launches Business In Japan
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July 20, 1998 (TOKYO) - A 50:50 joint venture of NIIT Ltd., a leading
information service firm in India, and Japan's CSK Corp. started business
in Japan this month.
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Japan India Information Technology Pte., Ltd. (JIIT) is a software developer
established jointly by the two companies in February 1998. The company,
capitalized at S$3 million (US$1.8 million), offers on-site and off-shore
software development services. Although its company's registration is
in Singapore, its actual sales activities are conducted in Japan with
its Japanese branch in Nakano-ku, Tokyo.
JIIT receives orders of application development and makes design concepts
in Japan. Sometimes activities in Japan include even detailed designing.
The software house will then proceed with most of detailed designing,
or coding and other works to be done later in the process in India.
After application development is completed, on-site tests are conducted
in Japan, and the finished software is delivered to users.
It is quite unusual in Japan for a company to offer on-site and off-shore
services of developing operational applications as its main business.
There are cases in which companies ask foreign software developers to
develop middleware or other lower levels of software.
Initially, JIIT will receive orders mainly from CSK, but it aims to boost
the percentage of orders from companies other than CSK to more than
50 percent of its total orders in fiscal 2001 ending in June 2002. Sales
are targeted at 500 million yen (US$3.5 million) in fiscal 1998 ending
in June 1999 and 4 billion yen (US$28 million) in fiscal 2001. The company
also aims to increase the number of employees to 40 in fiscal 2001 from
about 10 recorded as of July 1998.
In the future, the firm hopes to develop systems for multi-national companies
in addition to Japanese corporate customers. For that reason, it appointed
Shozo Uchida as chief executive officer. Uchida worked for Bain & Co.
in the United States and has developed expertise overseas in consultation
with ventures.
JIIT will standardize its two-week internal software development process
with a view to precisely communicate requirements from Japanese customers
to software developers in India.
Teiichi Aruga, senior managing director of CSK and chairman of JIIT,
said that the ways to make requirements for systems and make specifications
differ in Japan and India. For that reason, Japanese companies could
not ask Indian firms to develop application-level programs, although
they had been eying Indian software developers' ability, he explained.
Aruga added that few successful cases in the past are attributable to
differences in ways to develop systems between the two countries. However,
the problem can be solved by standardizing the process, he said.
(Hi-Tech News Center)
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