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Oracle expects 1,800 new jobs in India

Business software giant Oracle Corp said it plans to nearly double its staff in India in the next four years and has started hiring for a unit that will provide back-office services for its global operations.

"It is quite likely that we'll grow to 4,000 over the next four years," Derek Williams, executive vice-president in charge of the Asia-Pacific region for Oracle, told a news conference late on Tuesday.

Oracle India plans to add 1,800 more to its existing staff strength of 2,200 in two years.

He was speaking after the inauguration of the second phase of a sprawling building in Bangalore, which houses 1,200 of Oracle's 2,200 Indian workers, most of whom are software engineers.

Oracle, the world's second largest software company after Microsoft Corp, announced 200 development job cuts in Silicon Valley last month, and analysts said 600 more could be laid off.

Asked if jobs were being moved from the United States to India to cut costs, Williams said the expansion in India was part of the company's overall expansion strategy.

"We obviously put our development facilities in the country that makes most sense," he said. "Costs are important but not as much important as intellectual capital."

The Bangalore building will be home to a "shared services" unit providing back-office services such as accounting, staff management and payroll. It would initially employ 70 people.

"We'll be setting up a shared services operation for Oracle here and then perhaps a customer support operation," Williams said, adding the centre would back up work in Oracle's existing centres in Dublin, Sacramento and Sydney.

Oracle also plans a separate Internet sales unit in India which would use the Web to boost marketing, he said.

Attracted by relatively low paid English-speaking graduates, global firms are setting up back-office units in India. They have been joined by independent local firms offering providing similar services to companies overseas using high-speed telecommunication links.

Ranjan Chak, vice-president in Oracle for product services in Asia, said the company had already tested collaboration between global employees over telecoms in developing software products, and had set the way for other work using a similar model.

"From that we have shown that it works," Chak said.

Oracle officials said the Bangalore facility would have communication links capable of transmitting 45 megabits per second, said to be the highest bandwidth used by a private sector firm.

Oracle set up an Indian software centre in 1994 in Bangalore and followed it with another in Hyderabad. It also has a separate global consulting organisation and support centre based in India.

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