After absorbing Sierra Atlantic, the Hyderabad-based firm with strong Oracle practice, Hitachi Consulting has put Brazil on the radar for expansion.It has also begun a process to build SAP strengths to serve its global clients.“We are planning to enter Brazil market which has good skillsets and business potential,” Mr Sanjay Jasrani, Executive Vice-President and Head of GDCs in India and China, told Business Line .

The company, which has 2,000 employees in its three Global Delivery Centres (GDC) in India and one in China (all of which it got it from the Sierra acquisition), will hire 500 more this year. “A good number of them will be for our SAP initiative. Of the new hires, four hundred would be laterals and the remaining freshers,” Mr Sanjay Jasrani, Executive Vice-President and Head of GDCs in India and China, told Business Line .

Domestic market in India, however, is not on the immediate agenda of the firm. “We are focussing on serving multinational clients in the West and in Japan. It will take sometime before we look here for business,” he said.

Hitachi Consulting, an arm of the $112-billion Japanese firm with 3.60 lakh employees globally, acquired Sierra Atlantic to get footprint in offshore enterprise applications and outsourced product development capabilities.

Meanwhile, the company has started a branding exercise in India. As part of this, it held Programmers' Marathon contest in which 10,000 students from 70 engineering colleges participated.

> kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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