For Japan’s Fujitsu, the engineers working at its Indian offices are more than just delivery resources.
The multinational information technology and services company has chosen its global delivery centre in Pune to serve as a hub to impart Japanese language proficiency to its Indian engineers, with a view to using them to unlock the 83-year-old company’s vast intellectual property database — almost all of it in Japanese — for global deployment.
“Our objective is to unlock the knowledge acquired in Japanese language for Japanese people and to take it to the world,” Shrikant Vaze, CEO, Fujitsu Consulting India, said in an interview. “And India has become the hub for this.”
Mr. Vaze said Fujitsu has 78,000 patents and 90% of them were in Japanese, and were meant for Japan.
“If you want to bring these IPs [intellectual properties] on Artificial Intelligence, Digital and Internet of Things to the world, then these need to be translated and contextualised,” he said.
More than 700 Indian engineers have been trained so far, with most having attained a proficiency level of 3 and above. Level 1 is considered better than native Japanese speakers.
Global hub
“India has been selected to play a major role and it will become the global hub for unlocking of Japanese knowledge so that it can be translated into another language, more preferably English,” he added.
Every year, 200 engineers hired by Fujitsu Consulting India are trained in Japanese. The Pune unit, Fujitsu’s biggest global delivery centre, has the capability to train 600 people in Japanese a year.
“The patents are few things that connect the dots but there has to be conversion and contextualisation. India has been chosen as it has the language pool of graduate engineers and is already a multilingual country,” Mr. Vaze said.
The engineers help translate the patents, which are in Japanese. So whatever IPs Fujitsu has developed on smart cities, artificial intelligence, and analytics will be translated into English and will be passed on globally via India.
“We will transfer this knowledge base... and repurpose it for the world,” Mr. Vaze added.
