The Hindu Business Line : Patni to have more on embedded systems team

PATNI Computer Systems Ltd plans to strengthen its embedded systems and product engineering group in Bangalore and is on the lookout to hire more professionals with niche skill sets.

Mr Vijay Khare, Senior Vice-President, Patni Computer Systems, said the company thought of the building the embedded systems and product engineering group in Bangalore because of the availability of the skill sets. "A lot of product realisation skills are available in Bangalore, which is disproportionate to other what's available in other cities," he added.

Patni's development centre at Bangalore at present has some 300 people and has the capacity to accommodate another 900. However, Mr Khare declined to comment the number of people that the company planned to hire in Bangalore in the near-term.

"Embedded systems and product-engineering is a big growth area for us" Mr Khare said adding the company focussed on the consumer electronics domain. Patni is already working with several European and Korean companies in the consumer electronics domain by developing software for the MP3 player and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) products.

Embedded systems and product engineering group accounted for about five per cent of the company's total revenues. The company was also looking at tie-ups with some international product design and conceptualisation firms, Mr Khare added.

Meanwhile, Patni's operation that has been restructured on the lines of verticals would start functioning as strategic business units from early next year, Mr Khare said. The new SBUs carved along the verticals include the financial services, insurance, manufacturing, telecom, product engineering services and the ISV (Independent software vendors).

The restructured business would help the company to focus on these verticals in a better way, he said. Insurance, financial services, manufacturing and telecom are the top four verticals of the company in terms of revenue generation.