By NARITO OHTA
BANGALORE, India (Kyodo)

While the Indian offshore software development firm EximSoft Technologies Pvt Ltd. may not be as famous as Indian tech giants like Wipro and Infosys, it is making inroads in Japan.

"Most Japanese don't realize they are using made-in-India software embedded in their mobile, digital cameras, and other (devices) everyday", said P.N. Karanth, managing director of EximSoft technologies, which was set up in Bangalore - silicon valley of India - in 1997.

Japanese firms like Sony Corp. and Sharp Corp. account for about 60 percent of its revenue.

EximSoft's recent "big success" was the development of the mobile software product Cachatto. It allows anytime-anywhere access to resources within a corporate net from a personal device such as a mobile phone.

More than 10 Japanese firms have already introduced Cachatto, which is sold in Japan by Tokyo-based E-Jan Co., a spinoff of Toray Industries Inc.

But the share of exports to Japan is only 3 percent, while those to the US are 69 perent and to Europe 21 percent.

One of the latest Indian successes in Japan is Shinsei bank's introduction of the banking software product PowerFlex, which offers no charges on money transfers at automated teller machines.

PowerFlex was developed by the major Indian software house i-Flex solutions in Bombay. It is based on a system of about 50 servers, instead of a mainframe computer. A conventional mainframe based system would have cost the bank 10-times more, Shinsei bank sources said.

Vijayakumar Kabbin, an account manager at Wipro, has been engaged in offshore and onsite business with a Japanese electronics company since he joined the Indian software giant 16 years ago. Wipro's revenue from one Japanese company, whose name cannot be divulged, accounted for 8 percent of the

total 1 billion in the year that ended last month, compared with the nationwide average of 3 percent.

Outsourcing has recently become a hot-buttion issue in the US in the run up to November's presidential election, as there are growing concerns about the number of jobs being offshored to India. "Outsourcing is creating new jobs and markets in India," said Tarun Jauhari, director of ZapApp India Ltd., a subsidiary of First American Corp. Youths get more money and spend more in India. The domestic market could expand in the wake of a boom in the information technology industry.

The major US insurer is one of more than 300 US firms housed at the International Tech Park in Bangalore that was completed last year.
The number of Japanese companies including Toyota Motor Corp., setting up affiliates in Banglore is meanwhile on the rise.

But a Toshiba Corp. executive said that Japanese firms are still fixated on china.