"We are setting up this division to meet the demands from India and other parts of the world. Although we have a consultancy division in the US, it is unable to meet local demands," director, Asia Pacific operations, Lee Richardson said.

The company, one of the leading software providers for data warehousing, has activities in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong. "These are essentially for the local markets and we need to have a place from where we can service demands from other parts of the world," said Richardson.

The Indian consultancy division will have about 25 people in the first year, which will grow to 75 by the third year. Also, as a first step, the company will get its overseasexperts to train its Indian consultancy staff.

SAS Institute, which started its operations here about a year ago, is also planning to scale down its high power software solutions to suit the requirements of small and medium level companies. "Given the current economic situation, we are planning to introduce smaller packages which use less data and can be operated by fewer people," country manager Rohini Midha said.

While the scaled down package will be cheap and can be installed faster, it will also be less powerful as it will have only a part of the data that the regular package has. Data warehousing software essentially processes the operational data of a company and allows users to analyse the data which can be used by the companies to plan their strategies. "By implementing such a solution companies can find out trends among its customers and package its offerings accordingly," said Midha.