The Hindu Business Line : PeopleSoft to expand India operations

PEOPLESOFT Inc, the second largest enterprise application software vendor, plans to add about 1,000 people to its development operations in India in the current year. The company, currently, has two development centres in India with a headcount of about 400, which are being managed by Hexaware and Covansys.

PeopleSoft's India Services Centre (ISC), set up in collaboration with Hexaware, has about 250 people while the India Development Centre (IDC), being operated by Covansys, has some 150 engineers.

Mr Ram Gupta, Executive Vice-President, Products and Technology, PeopleSoft Inc, said about 500 people would be added to each of these two development centres by the year-end. The new jobs being created in India would be fresh jobs and do not involve any transfer of jobs from the US, he said. "We are adding additional bandwidth here in India," he said.

Both the ISC and IDC will continue to focus on development, implementation and support of PeopleSoft Enterprise, EnterpriseOne and World product families, for customers worldwide.

"We expect to offload more development work to our Indian partners in almost all the areas in which we operate," Mr Gupta said.

Currently, about 10 per cent of the company's product development is being done out of India through the partners.

"These centres have played a significant role in enabling PeopleSoft to lead the way in lowering cost and improving our customers' total ownership experience".

"Our accelerated ramp-up plan is a natural progression for us, in direct response to the high quality, rapid output we are seeing from our centres in India, and customer demand for high quality, offshore implementation services," he said.

However, Mr Gupta clarified that PeopleSoft does not have any immediate plans to set up direct presence in India.

The current partnership with Hexaware and Covansys is based on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) model and the company has the option to acquire the development teams at a later date, he added.