Google R&D center in B'lore to start operations soon

Wednesday, 05 May 2004, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Google Inc., the world's largest search engine, has started working towards making its research centre in Bangalore operational soon, said an official associated with the project Wednesday. The company is setting up an engineering research and development centre in the Indian technology capital to undertake projects in data mining, data warehousing, business intelligence and knowledge management. The Internet search technology firm is also setting up a customer support centre in Hyderabad. Bangalore-based Software Technology Parks of India's (STPI) director B.V. Naidu told IANS the approval for Google centre was given recently and the global firm was on a hiring spree to take on board top engineers. "The approvals for setting up the centre was given a fortnight ago and Google has already started recruiting people to get cracking. It is investing around $3 million to $4 million initially in the centre," he added. The company has registered with the STPI to locate its centre within the premises of the technology park. The STPI provides satellite-linked data services to IT firms and incubates start-ups. To be headed by a three-member team, including Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist, Antoine Colaco, manager, and Narayanan Shiva Kumar, the centre will have a number of software engineers, top programmers and computer scientists. The Indian-born Bharat, a graduate from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Chennai, was instrumental in launching Google news search engine. Touted to be its first full-fledged engineering facility outside the US, Google's engineering development team in Bangalore will mirror its other offices, with the same scope of work and hiring standards. "Our engineering team in Bangalore will work on problems in a number of areas, including information retrieval, a variety of novel search features, and scalability issues," said a company source. In addition, the centre will work on India specific technologies and products. "More than the cost advantage, it is the availability of high-skilled engineers and scientists that has made Google set shop in India," said Naidu of STPI. "The political backlash in the US over tech jobs moving to India in the wake of increasing outsourcing by global firms is understood to be one of the reasons for Google to keep its India plans under wraps." Besides one in Mountain View, California, Google has two more locations in the US at Santa Monica in California and New York, with about 1,000 employees on its rolls. Half of them work on technical or engineering-related jobs. Google filed a registration statement with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US last week for an initial public offering (IPO) this year. The IPO will consist of a portion of shares to be issued and sold by its founder promoters and a portion held by some of its stockholders.
Source: IANS
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