Adaptec to expand India operations
Wednesday, 14 January 2004, 20:30 IST
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HYDERABAD: Adaptec Inc, a global leader in storage solutions, Wednesday announced plans to expand its research and development operations in India. The move is intended to strengthen its engineering operations and support the growing needs of its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers worldwide. Adaptec plans to invest over $25 million over the next four years to help drive development of the company's silicon and system-level technologies for OEM customers in North America, the Asia Pacific, Europe and Australia, which account for over 65 percent of the company's revenue. Robert N. Stephens, president and CEO of Adaptec, told a news conference that a large portion of the investment would go in setting up testing laboratories, one each in Hyderabad and Bangalore. The state-of-the-art laboratories would do the testing and make it remotely accessible around the world. Adaptec plans to double the size of its management and engineering teams in the two cities in the next year. The company currently has 75 engineers at the Hyderabad site, which engages in basic development. It employs 35 people in the software development facility in Bangalore. "India has become a technology centre that enables us to work more closely with key partners and OEMs such as Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems," said Ram Jayam, vice president and general manager of Adaptec's storage and networking group. Stephens said net revenue during this fiscal year was expected to be $440 million. The company has assets worth $1 billion. Referring to the strength of the basic development work being done in Hyderabad, Ram said the team had developed .13-micron silicon chips, the largest and fastest chips developed out of processors like Intel. This technology would make storage affordable and easy to use, Ram said. The team has also developed 25-layer boards with a capacity of four gigabytes. He said this technology would revolutionise the market in five years. "As storage needs grow this technology enables the storage to grow seamlessly," said Ram. The company has four development facilities in North America, a manufacturing facility in Singapore and an infrastructure support site in Japan. "The growth is much more in Hyderabad than in the US sites," Stephens said.
Source: IANS
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