Forget BRIC-countries. It’s the R.I.CH.I-countries. David Hill of eChannelline wrote today that EMC, an IT-supplier, recently announced that it established a Centers of Excellence program in four emerging markets, Russia, India, China and Israel. Under the program, EMC will invest locally in software development and manufacturing and gain access to the local talent pool that can help with future innovation.
Hill’s article describes how the program works using China as the example,
”How EMC taps into that talent pool to hire the proverbial “best and brightest” is illustrated in China. The country annually produces a huge population of computer science and engineering graduates, and EMC receives thousands of resumes. Through a process that includes standardized testing and multiple interviews, the company is able to winnow down to a selected number who are given job offers.
EMC is able to select the crème de la crème from a very deep talent pool, and the company states that its employee turnover is a fraction of the industry mean. Maybe that’s because EMC has figured out how to make the COE developers work together, drive productive relationships with developers around the world, and innovate based on country or regional opportunities.”
It’s intersting to note that EMC chose Israel in place of Brazil, which is an emerging market that along with China, India and Russia are known as the BRIC-countires and are the largest emerging markets. It’s not a surprising decision though considering that in the past year, EMC’s competition, IBM in specific, have acquired Israeli companies with key technology that threatens EMC’s business, especially storage.
Data storage and data security were hot topics in 2008 and are expected to continue to be in 2009 with Israel leading the way in innovation. The smartest part of this move for EMC is that instead of spending millions on purchasing companies with these technologies in the future and then converting them into R&D centers, it can now go after these future entrepreneurs before they start their own company and offer them incentives to stay (such as a good work environment). It can be assumed that EMC will get a positive ROI from the Israeli COE program in the very near future.
In addition, this news answers the question I asked after reviewing IBM’s purchase of FilesX last year.
