Zynga India office is not just an offshore center

BANGALORE, INDIA: Zynga, the social game provider, has announced to expand out of the US and open its center in India. The India operation, based in Bangalore, will focus on game development and large-scale infrastructure to support the delivery of Zynga games.

Speaking at the launch event of India Operation, Shan Kadvil, country manager for Zynga India, said that Zynga is looking forward to hiring around 100 engineers over the next year.

“Our focus will be on building the next generation infrastructure that can handle the tremendous growth of Zynga Games,” he said.

“We would move in a phased manner. To start with, we are looking at hiring 100 engineers. We would start with the industry professionals who have prior experience in cloud, distributed networking. This approach would be manifold starting with experienced professionals to graduates from universities and colleges.”

Apart from this, the Indian team already has a team of 20 people, including Shan, who joined Zyanga around four months back. Previously he was vice president - Products and country manager at SupportSoft Inc, of which he was a co-founder.

Elaborating on the roles and responsibility of the India team, he said that this is the first center of Zynga outside the US. The engineers would work at open source processes, Linux kernel, apache issues. This is not an outsource but an extension of what the engineers have been doing in the US. They would also work on developing new games and new applications.

Online gaming in India is rapidly expanding, and Zynga India is committed to delivering social games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Café World, and FishVille to Indian players.

In India, 41 percent of active Internet users played online games in 2008, up 89 percent from the previous year, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India. With more than 81 million Internet users, India is projected to become the third largest online market behind China and the U.S. by 2013.