Infosys to expand presence in Chandigarh

CHANDIGARH: Infosys Technologies is expected to buy additional space in the IT Tech Park at Chandigarh promoted by the Chandigarh Administration. The company plans to buy an additional 20 acre plot in the IT Park, which has a total land allotment of 100 acre. Infosys would be the largest occupant in the Tech Park.

The new campus would house 2,500 professionals and is expected to become operational by 2004. However this would still be the smallest campus that Infosys would have as compared to its existing locations at Bhubaneshwar, Mysore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Mangalore and Bangalore.

The biggest campus that Infosys Technologies has at present is at Mysore spawning an area of 138 acre. Justifying the small space in the Tech Park in Chandigarh, Jagdish K Vasishtha, Head, Mohali Development Center said, "The new Tech Park in Chandigarh itself is small. But we are confident that if we want more space it will be available to us."

Hiring for the new center would be on a centralized basis with employees being hired from all across the country. Vasishtha maintained that the manpower supply in the region also is extremely good with about 15 percent of the existing employee base recruited locally. Besides, there are other factors that argue well for Chandigarh like housing facilities, schools and recreational facilities.

Infosys Technologies had set up a development center in Mohali in 2000. It has 150 developers working on telecom technologies and serving the European region. The total capacity can be expanded to 200 developers. The center is working on areas like OSS and billing solutions, mobile applications and data communication technologies.

As a vertical business unit in the organization, the Mohali team falls under the Communication and Product Services (CAPS) group. The center services its clients in the European region for all its product categories from the Mohali center. Other areas of work that the center would look into expanding include network management service and product competency center. The Infosys Mohali center has connectivity of 128 KBPS from STPI connecting it to US, 2 MB connectivity from BSNL linking it to Bangalore and 64 KBPS from VSNL linking the center to the US.