PMC Sierra to outsource design to India

BANGALORE: PMC Sierra, a US based supplier of high-performance integrated circuits, principally used by equipment manufacturers in the telecommunications industry, will start outsourcing parts of its chip design process to India by the second quarter of 2004.

"We are in the process of evaluating partners for the outsourcing project. We will begin by outsourcing portions of certain of our assignments to the partners and wait till the team begins to mold and work together before sending in more work. The ultimate aim will be to set up a dedicated design center in the country which we hope will happen in 2005," said PMC Sierra World Wide sales VP, Haresh Patel.

According to him, the initial team at the outsourcing partner will be only around 10, but the dedicated design center, if and when it comes up will have close to 50. The company is also planning a technical support center in India, which will do work akin to a call center as part of its function.

"Right now, most of the call centric work is being handled by our field applications people where they routinely answer customer calls. We envision that this work, which constitutes 25 percent of an individual application worker's daily time, can be done out of India. This will be supplanted by a staff that helps in actual technical support as well," said Patel.

The company will be setting up its technical support office in the country sometime in 2004 with an initial strength of three people. PMC has a sales presence in India through two distributors Corel CG and Unique Memec, with a sales team of close to 10 people and around 45 customers.

"APAC is where our growth exists because of the booming telecom market. Right now, it contributes 34 percent of our revenue but we expect it to grow to 50 percent in three years time. India, though right now a small market, holds quite a bit of potential for the future. We expect India to chalk more than $ one million in sales this financial year," said Patel.

According to him, the vertical segments of communications, storage and high volume and velocity enterprise consumption will comprise equal shares of PMC revenues in the future as opposed to the past when communication was the biggest contributor. The organization declined to reveal exact figures of investment for the country.

(CyberMedia News Service)