Pune, February 24
Japan’s IT market ? the second largest in the world ? has been making steady ventures to tap into the wellspring of Indian IT professionals. Japanese language training centres have mushroomed. And the results are becoming apparent; last year about 125 IT professionals from Pune got themselves contracts in Japan.

Companies like Softbridge Solutions which act as training centres and often play middleman in the entire process confirm the trend. Softbridge ? headquartered in Japan with offices in Tokyo and Pune ? has tied up with the Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC) and Advance Computing Training School (ACTS) for software training and development.

Says Prashant Jain, managing director, ‘‘We have placed 25 IT professionals from C-DAC with Japanese companies. And for the first time we are training nine Japanese IT students here at C-DAC.’’

At Softbridge’s Pune branch, Indian software professionals are also given a five month crash course in the Japanese language. Jain aims at establishing Pune as a sort of offshore IT training centre for Japan.

He adds, ‘‘The Japanese investment in India is still minuscule. They had moved aggressively into China, but after a risk analysis decided not to put all their eggs into one basket.’’ He estimates that about 200 interested Japanese companies are operating in India.

Shrikant Rasane, director of Seed Infotech Pvt Ltd that is into software development and training, agrees. Seed tied up with the Japanese IPOC, an IT professional placement and offshore development firm, two years back. In the last one year they have sent 100 Pune software professionals with three to eight years experience to Japan.

As for the professionals themselves, they seem to consider it a career-savvy move. Sandeep Paranjpe, a software professional into embedded systems, invested seven months of training in Japanese to get a contract with a firm there. ‘‘Japan is technically very savvy when it comes to embedded systems. Even if I don’t want to renew my existing contract of two years, this experience will look good on my resume,’’ he explains.

For him and the other aspirants to Asok’s ultimate techie mantle, the time and energy invested in the entire process are well worth it.
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