Prakash Devendra Rao (31) is a software specialist from India, who works in Dublin in a senior job with the IT Alliance Group, an innovative IT services company.
India is one of the fast rising stars of the global IT scene and the expansion of its IT industry during the past few years has been phenomenal.
As a result of the country's high-tech educational programmes, India produces some 250,000 new IT professionals every year, creating a significant labour pool not just for the Indian IT industry, but for the worldwide industry.
Prakash Devendra Rao is one of those IT professionals who went to work abroad, in Ireland. He's from Bangalore and was brought up there; it's at the hub of the Indian IT industry.
He graduated in engineering and went on to spend a couple of years in marketing, all the time continuing his studies in IT before deciding to look for a job in that sector. He then went on to gain much IT experience in different parts of India.
Many top IT personnel in India emigrate, to work in the industry in either Europe or the US and by this stage, Prakash Devendra Rao had decided he wanted to work in an English-speaking country in Europe, which meant either Ireland or Britain. Along came the IT Alliance Group from Ireland. It had been set up in 1997 and it has grown rapidly ever since, now with 280 employees and over 300 additional contract staff working in three main areas, out-sourcing; testing and consulting.
The group is active throughout the Irish market from its locations in Belfast and Dublin and in March this year, launched its new software development and testing facility in Belfast. This new centre is servicing the growth in the group's business in the Republic and also provides a springboard into other European markets. Also recently, it announced its partnership with Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions.
IT Alliance went to India to recruit and Prakash Devendra Rao found himself with a job in Dublin. He remembers vividly arriving in the city. "It was April 16th, 1998 and it was a cold evening." He has been working for IT Alliance ever since and welcomes the fact that the group gave him the opportunity to get a breakthrough in his IT work ambitions.
He began by working mainly on legacy systems, then spent some months in Cobol work, before moving into development work for clients. Then followed work in management information systems and database management, including work for one particular client, a large supermarket group that produces enormous volumes of data.
Then he moved on to technical consulting and now he's a team leader in software development, in charge of a small team of about eight people. He likes the IT Alliance Group and says that they have encouraged him to develop his IT career.
