'Israel should have imported Indian software engineers'

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 02 January 2004, 20:30 IST
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JERUSALEM: Israel could have become a high-tech superpower had it imported Indian software engineers when the IT industry peaked a few years ago, a senior official of a leading software company said. "Israeli brain-power is an expensive and scarce resource and action must be taken to strengthen the industry. When the high-tech boom peaked three or four years ago, Israel made the mistake by not allowing import of more inexpensive software personnel such as programmers from India," said Shai Agassi, the executive board member of SAP (Israel), the German-based inter-enterprise software firm. "Salaries in the industry wouldn't have been so high, and we might now be a high-tech superpower. Companies stayed here solely for sentimental reasons, which is why we have a development centre here with over 200 employees," he said while addressing computer science students at The Technion {Israel Institute of Tecnology) in Haifa on Wednesday. Purely marketing companies will not succeed in Israel because "we don't have the same capabilities as we have in technology," Agassi was quoted as saying by business daily Globes on Thursday. Agassi, who was voted by Time magazine and CNN as the 20th most influential businessperson for 2003, manages technology development at SAP, the world's third largest software supplier of e-business solutions.