Our Bureau

Mr Madhukar Dev

Chennai , March 30

TATA Elxsi Ltd on Wednesday announced the launch of its Chennai centre. To house 100 people initially, the centre will look at scaling that strength up to 500. The company's total manpower strength is currently around 1,700.

The centre will work on wireless communication technologies that form a part of its design and development services division. The company has centres in Bangalore, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram. Addressing presspersons, Mr Madhukar Dev, Managing Director of Tata Elxsi, said that the choice of Chennai as a centre for its design and development services stemmed from the easy availability of skilled manpower in the region.

Mr Jayen Gourishankar, Head, Chennai centre, said, "Our work is on the convergence of mobile technologies with those of the wireless local area network (WLAN). Currently, mobile telephony offers very good access but not a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth is affordable on the LAN.

"So, a mobile phone that hooks on to the WLAN when it is in the area will be able to use applications that require high bandwidth, such as watching movies on the phone. Once one goes out of the WLAN range, the phone automatically switches to the mobile technology that is even currently in use."

On asked what is driving the software services business of the company, Mr Dev, earlier told Business Line, "The semiconductor industry is fuelling several applications that create opportunities for companies such as ours." He brushed away the suggestion that an impending slump in the semiconductor business would affect Tata Elxsi's fortunes. "We work on applications that make use of semiconductor capabilities. This work is independent of the cyclical nature of the semiconductor business."

Commenting on the issue of the reported proposals to merge the company with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the flagship IT entity of the Tata Group, Mr Dev said, "At our company level, there is no such move. There are pros and cons to the merger proposal. We recognise the advantage of being big, such as the ability to recruit huge numbers at short notice. As a small company, you can easily be nimble." Asked if he would personally drive the initiative to merge Tata Elxsi with TCS, he replied in the negative.