EMC's business in Russia grew 50 percent in 2006 -- four times more than on average in other countries, Luc Brunet, general manager of EMC Russia/CIS/Baltics, said.
The company is planning a mass hiring outside the US in the nearest future. It intends to expand divisions dealing with localization and sales of developed solutions and customer service in countries with the biggest growth potential, including Russia. New regional representative offices are to appear. Inside the CIS area new offices will be opened in Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg and Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan in 2007. At the time being, EMC's rep offices operating in the post-Soviet territory are situated in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Kiev, Ukraine.
The staff of overseas software development centers, which are located in China, Belgium, India, Ireland and Israel, will be rapidly expanded. In the beginning of this year recruitment of developers also started in Russia.
Rona Newmark, senior vice president of EMC Excellence Center design and commissioning, says that the corporation is becoming global rather than American. The amount of money it is investing in the Saint Petersburg center must prove that it views Russia not only as a marketing outlet 'but as one of the most promising areas from the perspective of business globalization', she said.
Russia will receive just approximately 10 percent of the US$1 billion the corporation is going to have invested into business expansion in BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) by 2010.
Although Russia is not among the most populated countries, it leads in the number of technical experts and the quality of their training. Russian higher schools increase the number of technology-savvy graduates by 10 percent annually. That is why establishment of the development center in Saint-Petersburg seems logical to EMC representatives.
The corporation is going to engage around a hundred of developers to work in Saint Petersburg in 2007. It has already hired 50. They work for a development center, which was set up last year and is own by an independent company Captiva, later acquired by EMC. This team is mainly occupied with adapting EMC solutions to the Russian market. New employees of the center will mostly do development of new products. Two thirds or even three fourth of the Russian development center's work would be done for the whole corporation needs, Newmark said.
Initially, the Center will focus on two aspects -- content management and data storage systems. Most of the personnel will be engaged in content management. In the future, the Center will expectedly take part in other projects, like information security developments, scanning and information input.
Finding experienced developers might be a problem in Saint-Petersburg. Most of them have been snapped up by other large foreign companies and leading Russian software companies that have been actively opening their development centers in the Northern capital over the last few years.
A portion of development work may be given to Russian outsourcing companies. Such model is already used in China where a development center opened around a year ago. However, EMC would be interested only in offers from 'fairly large companies which have offices in other Russian and CIS cities', Newmark said. Yet, in the beginning, new products will be mainly developed by employees of the new center.
EMC Excellence Center will be located in one of business centers in the center of Saint Petersburg. EMC plans to occupy offices that are now being prepared in July, 2007.
EMC is also going to significantly expand the staff that will be responsible for sales and customer service in Russia and CIS countries. The number of employees of the corporation's Russian offices is expected to rise by approximately 2.5 times -- from 100 to 250 -- this year.