Hitachi, the $113-billion Japanese major, has set its sights on India to sell its software products.
It is in talks with domestic players such as Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and L&T Infotech to appoint as system integrator.
The Japanese major has been in India for the last 15 years selling a wide range of products ranging from power and industrial systems, industrial components and equipment, air conditioning and refrigeration equipment to international procurement of software, materials and components. However, it is now turning to software to further consolidate its presence in India. Hitachi's revenue in India was over Rs 5,000 crore and it employs around 7,000 people in various sectors.
According to Nasscom, the domestic market for IT services is likely to touch $50 billion by 2020 from the present $2 billion. Hitachi will first launch its document and workflow management systems that helps government organisations create an ‘easy-to-use' system to streamline communications and automate workflow, said Mr Masayoshi Tamura, Director of India Business Strategy, Global Business Center, IT Management Software of Hitachi.
“There are a large number of such organisations carrying out various government-to-citizen and government-to- business interfaces. They have their own need for document and workflow management systems,” he said. Hitachi's software enable companies to monitor their IT environment to detect potential problems, identify the root cause and range of impact, accumulate knowledge and automate recovery,” he said.
This software is well known in Japan with over 1,000 customers and over 10,000 licences using it but is not heard of in India. “We need to change this trend with some aggressive marketing in the coming months. We now have four sales people and by the year end have around 15 people who will directly sell our software to clients,” Mr Tamura told Business Line on the sidelines of the Nasscom forum.
In 2010, the global research firm IDC in a report identified the global Job Scheduling Software, which is a tool that manage the flow of workloads and applications on systems, market to be $1.9 billion.