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.