Veritas India to up work force by 30%
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 06 April 2005, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE:Veritas Software India, a storage software company and a subsidiary of Veritas Software USA, will ramp up its work force for fiscal 2005-06. With a current employee base of 1100 workers, the company desires to increase it by 30 percent by year-end, said Sharad Sharma, General Manager, India operations. “And this is backed by the torrid growth we witnessed in India last financial year.” In a revolutionary way to handle the technology talent and the innovations, the company for the first time created the position of Chief Technology Officer in India—something unique to multinational companies in India. Also, appreciating the work performance by this subsidiary, the holding company introduced new flow of funds called the discretionary funds, said Sharma. “Ultimately new product development is somewhat of an organic process and there is always an element of serendipity involved so you have to have some discretionary budget, and we hope this discretionary funds will help Veritas India pursue worthwhile innovations.” Currently Veritas catch point is India’s predominant SMB market—an opportunity that spreads beyond India to some of the Asia Pacific region as well. “So certain amount of confidence and gut feel in investing India will help us and if Veritas India can bring in some kind of product for the SMB segment here, then you have created a product for Asia Pacific,” he said. Veritas India, a Pune-based entity, today has 30 percent of its worldwide R&D (in terms of head count) and 35 percent of its patents coming from India. Veritas claims that the per capita productivity in terms of patent is much higher than any of its other facility across the world. But as the company is trying to restructure its focus from a technology development company to a product development company they are facing some serious set backs in hiring quality Product Manager. “So we obviously have to look at foreign product managers as a short term goal,” said Sharma. Veritas a heavyweight in storage software recently merged with Symantec another heavyweight in security software in an all-stock transaction—with 60 percent of the stake with Symantec and 40 with Veritas. However, this merger in no way is expected to change Veritas India strategy, said Sharma. “In fact even after the merger with Symantec, Veritas India will remain as the biggest development center.” Veritas today develops entire cluster file servers (CFS) for its customers across the world from its Pune center. Sharma adds, “Today every HP’s high-end server will go with a CFS developed by Veritas India.”

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