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Chennai, Nov 7: Software major Infosys Technologies Ltd (ITL) will invest over Rs 50 crore in setting up a world-class software campus at the old Mahapulipuram Road area in Chennai as a strategy to prepare the company for future expansion needs.
This investment will be part of an overall plan to spend Rs 200 crore in various expansion projects which aims to take the company's total employee strength to 3,500 to 4,000 people in the next two years or so, company deputy managing director Nandan M Nilekani said.
"The country's infotech industry is growing at 40 per cent to 50 per cent in dollar terms and we expect to be compatible with this growth rate," he said.Speaking to the reporters on the occasion of the opening of the second software development centre at Santhome in Chennai, Nilekani said the company has invested Rs 8 crore for this centre which will have 23.167 sq ft space and employ around 240 people.
The company had entered Chennai in 1997 with its first development centre at Alexander Square inGuindy with an investment of Rs 12 crore occupying 27,000 sq ft of space and employing 210 people.
The new software campus, which will come up in 15 acres of land, is being designed for 1,000 people. It will have all modern facilities for training, recreation and food. It is expected to be commissioned by end of 1999.The company, according to Nilekani, will focus in a range of services which include Y2K, telecom, ERP and Internet consulting. It expects to provide value addition for tapping huge business opportunities in electronic commerce and E-mail.
Some 23 per cent of the total workforce will be trained in the emerging opportunity areas like the Internet, ERP package implementation and euro conversion service. The company plans to globalise its operations and will look to acquisitions in the near future.
Earlier, industry secretary MS Srinivasan emphasised the need for training in infotech with a view to reaching out to the common people so that their problems can be addressed. The state governmentis taking the initiative to put all government forms like pension within six months on the Internet and make them available free of charge to users.
This will stop corruption by doing away with middlemen who charge exorbitant fees for giving the forms. The next stage will be for the people to fill them up and use the infotech network to send them to the concerned department heads.
He said from next July, information technology will be included as a compulsory subject in classes ten and twelve. Companies like Infosys could help reformulate the school curriculum.
Information technology secretary D Prakash said the state government was committed to using infotech as a tool for development. However, to make information technology acceptable by the public at large, its development should be in local language. He appealed to the information technology industry to provide a fillip to this end by developing standards for encoding in Tamil language.
Prakash also called for making the front-end of informationtechnology user friendly without which it will not be accepted by the people as much as the government desires.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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