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NEC to boost use of Asian software engineers

Japanese computer and electronics conglomerate NEC Corp said on Thursday it plans to substantially boost its use of engineers in India, China and other parts of Asia for software development.

"We're using the services of about 1,600 Asian software engineers...and we want to raise that to 4,000 by 2003," NEC President Koji Nishigaki told a seminar sponsored by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun financial daily.

Companies in Japan, the United States and elsewhere are increasingly tapping software talent in India and other emerging nations to boost efficiency and reduce costs.

Nishigaki cited an NEC project to migrate core banking system products from proprietary mainframe systems to the open Unix operating system. About 600 engineers in India and China and another 200 in the United States and Japan are working on the project, he said.

Regarding the development of software engineering resources in Japan, where qualified developers are often in short supply, Nishigaki said the reform-minded government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was trying to break down some of the barriers inhibiting badly needed collaboration between academia and industry in Japan.

He also called for boosting the availability of skilled personnel to levels found in Singapore.

"I don't know if it's possible, but we must educate and raise the level of our human resources with the aim of becoming a 100-million-population Singapore," he said.

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