BANGALORE: Security and networking major Juniper Networks today opened its new R&D campus in Bangalore into, which it has invested $8.5 million. The center currently houses around 325 engineers and the company plans to up its tech force to 675 by the end of next year.

At present, the Bangalore center makes up for around 10 percent of the company's overall global engineering team. Some of the key activities undertaken in Juniper's Bangalore center, started in 2003, include software and hardware development, system testing and technical assistance.

“The goal of our new facility is to provide a platform to achieve end to end ownership for multiple products,” said Sam Srinivas, chief technologist, Juniper Networks.

He added that the engineering team in India was involved in the GGSN product development along with Ericsson and also in the end-to-end development of the J-series enterprise router. “Currently, we are adding VoIP functionality to our J-series router.”

Srinivas said that the Indian engineers were involved in working on almost every Juniper product line. “We have substantial expertise in software and also in hardware.”

He added that one of Juniper's recent acquisitions-Peribit, which provides WAN optimization solutions, planned to start development on its products in Bangalore by January 2006.