The Hindu Business Line : Philips to double software workforce in India by 2007

PHILIPS on Thursday announced that it was planning to double its software workforce at its Bangalore campus to touch 2,200 people by 2007 and bring more work for its medical systems group, semiconductor and offshore corporate technologies to India.

Consumer electronics (CE) will continue to be a large part of Philips' strategy but growth will be slow in that division, as most of the work in CE is already being done out of Bangalore, Mr Bob Hoekstra, CEO, told Business Line.

Investments of $50 million will go mainly into its new campus and infrastructure, while projected exports from the centre would amount to 100 million euros. Philips contributes over 20 per cent of the software content of its products now. "We are recruiting from campuses but most of the growth will be in the hiringof people with some experience," Mr Hoekstra said.

Philips Innovation Campus (PIC) in Bangalore has expertise primarily in embedded and information system engineering, architecture design, programming and testing. The integrated circuit (IC) design expertise is in the areas of logic and circuit design. In addition, competencies in project management, requirement engineering and quality assurance have been established, according to the company.

PIC now supports almost all software-intensive products, including televisions, digital versatile discs (DVDs) and audio products such as MP3 jukeboxes. Other products that it supports, include modalities for medical systems such as magnetic resonance imaging/ MRI, x-ray, computerised tomography scanning, ultrasound and medical IT systems.

PIC also has expertise in developing software for semiconductor platforms for consumer and communications products like televisions, DVDs, audio, and bus systems (universal serial bus/USB and wireless fidelity/Wi-Fi).

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