Intel to expand Indian arm, invest $25m

new delhi: microprocessor major intel's india development centre is all set to more than double its staff strength over next two years at an estimated additional investment of $25 million. the company has so far invested $25 million in the centre and it is already intel's largest non-manufacturing site in asia. in an exclusive interview with times news network, intel's director for south asia avtar saini said: "india is a strategic resource centre for us and we are looking at transferring more projects to india on a regular basis.this could easily mean doubling of the present numbers within next two years and i will be surprised if we do not grow to a strength of 2,000 within next two years." according to saini, the strength of the centre will cross 1,000 mark by the end of 2002. intel had set up the centre in 1999 with 10 employees. last year, it announced an investment of $25 million in creating the infrastructure, including a new building that can house 1,100 people. so far, intel idc operations have been run from six different locations in bangalore, but the company is keen to consolidate these in two or three locations. engineers at the centre work on applications and technologies for e-business and develop software and hardware for networking and communications. this includes chipset functionalities and chipset drivers for intel microprocessors. according to intel, it sees value in using the engineering resources available in india and it is a long-term strategic direction for the world's leading chipmaker. in addition to the indian centre, intel has also outsourced projects to local infotech giants like wipro, infosys and sasken. as part of its global vision to be the pre-eminent supplier of building blocks to the internet economy, intel has defined four key architectures. intel india idc is doing work on three of these key architectures, according to idc head manni kantipudi. the first is the existing 32-bit architecture which focuses on the pentium family of processors. intel india has been designing graphic device drivers and wireless device drivers for pentium products. besides, it also develops optimised solutions for independent software vendors on the 32-bit platform. the 64-bit architecture focuses on the itanium family of products. some of iidc engineers are designing parts of the itanium compiler which is considered a critical part of the complete itanium solution. the third is intel's architecture for networking and communications known as the internet exchange architecture. intel idc has over 300 employees focused on solutions in this space, right from designing and developing communications protocols, switches, routers, digital signal processor algorithms and electronic design automation tools. the fourth architecture is the personal client architecture which is focused on wireless products. iidc is yet to do anything in the pca space. "we use internet from our internal efficiency standpoint. we have over 300 employees in india, designing and developing solutions to manage our manufacturing, procurement, planning, selling, logistics, finance, accounting, payroll, human resources, and employee services applications," said kantipudi. intel india is also involved in the company's mission to growing new businesses. intel microelectronic services is one such business that does asic design for external customers and intel india has five chip design teams for ims. india's strength lies in the availability and quality of manpower, besides the cost advantage, according to kantipudi. "the cost in india is no doubt a compelling factor that impacts the bottomline, but the availability of good quality manpower allows intel to hire the best and improve time-to-market on products by ramping up a team in a shorter time than it would take in other parts of the world," said kantipudi. "the engineers in india idc are on par with intel engineers in other parts of the world. they have a good work ethic and speak reasonably good english to collaborate with engineers worldwide. there are many sites in the world that are cheaper than india, but don't have a good number of engineers, or the quality," he added. intel's other development centres are located in poland, denmark, russia, malaysia, israel and china.