Veritas Software Corp.’s research and development (R&D) centre in Pune, India, will soon be the company’s largest worldwide, according to a company executive.
While the company’s U.S. labs typically focus on a single product line, product development work at the Pune centre cuts across several of the company’s storage and utility computing product lines, according to Jose Iglesias, vice president of Veritas’ international engineering group. The company, based in Mountain View, California, sells storage and utility computing software.
The R&D centre in Pune currently employs about 900 staff, according to Iglesias, who added that more staff would be added next year. Veritas currently employs about 3,000 staff worldwide for R&D. The company is however not moving R&D jobs from the U.S. to India, Iglesias added.
“We are seeing growth across all locations,” he said.
In September Veritas set up a lab in Beijing. The company announced in October that it was also setting up a lab in Tokyo. However, unlike the Pune lab, the Beijing and Tokyo labs will initially focus on addressing the local requirements of these countries, Iglesias said.
One of the Beijing lab’s first roles, for example, is providing support for Red Flag Linux on Veritas’ products, as it is key to doing business in the Chinese Linux market, according to Iglesias. China-based Red Flag offers a version of Linux.
The Tokyo lab will let Veritas work closely with Japanese computer manufacturers to ensure better and quicker support for their equipment in Veritas’ software, he added.
The lab in Beijing will grow to about three dozen staff, while the lab in Tokyo will have about two dozen staff, Iglesias said. “The main reason for opening up these centres in Beijing and in Tokyo is to grow revenues in these countries by meeting the requirements of these markets,” said Iglesias. He added the availability of low-cost computer programmers in India fostered Veritas’ expansion in the country.
Veritas invested about US$50 million in the Pune centre this year, and plans to invest another US$50 million next year, according to Steven Leonard, Veritas’ senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific and Japan at Veritas. The company will add staff at the Pune centre at the rate of 50 employees a month, Leonard told reporters Monday in Delhi on the sidelines of a conference. The indications are that the company will hire between 450 to 600 new staff next year.
