NEW DELHI: Chinese information technology majors are looking up to their well established counterparts in India for technical and training support to give a boost to their IT and IT-enabled services (ITeS) industry. They not only want Indian companies to share technical expertise with them but also help set up IT education centres and train their executives on business process outsourcing (BPO), in which India is the world-leader.

Chinese companies are so keen to join hands with Indian companies that in the recently concluded Northeast Asia Hi-Tech Fair at Shenyang in China, nine cooperation agreements and memoranda of understanding (MoU) were signed between Chinese and Indian IT companies.

“The event turned about to be successful for Indian IT and ITeS companies.

The India Pavilion at the fair got more than 150 business queries, some of which are now at the advanced stage of formalisation,” said the India-China Alliance Centre’s (ICAC) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Piyush Bahl.

ICAC had put up the India IT software pavilion at the exhibition and taken a 25-member delegation to Beijing and Shanghai.

The India contingent had top executives from leading IT companies including Toonz Animation, Infosys Technologies, Satyam, NIIT, Techopark (Thiruvananthapuram), InfoPark (Kochi), Sakshi Automation and Info Tech Corporation (Goa). “The India Pavilion drew over 5,000 business visitors from Mainland China, South Korea and Japan,” said Mr. Bahl.

Stating that IT education and training is one area where India is all set to play a major role in China, Mr. Bahl said Chinese universities and other institutions were keen to join hands with Indian firms. For instance, NIIT China (Shanghai) Ltd. alone signed three MoUs, while other companies such as Toonz Animation and Deep Blue 3D Animation Company would also play an important role soon. Similarly, the agreement between Technopark (Thiruvananthapuram) and InfoPark (Kochi) with the Shenyang Information Industry Bureau envisaged collaboration in the areas of BPO, software export, software outsourcing training and animation outsourcing, the ICAC CEO said.

Stressing that it will be a long-term engagement between Indian and Chinese IT companies, Mr. Bahl said they would be participating in ‘Chinasoft 2008,’ in Chengdu city in Central China, with a much bigger IT delegation.

“Till now we were looking towards the U.S. and Europe, but now IT companies have started to realise that China and the Asia Pacific region have much more potential. India is the leader in software and the Chinese are ahead in hardware business, and a combination of the two can be a win-win situation for both nations,” ICAC CEO said.