In yet another indication of uptake in the commercial real estate sector, NetApp Inc said its one million square feet research and development (R&D) centre in Bengaluru will be slated for operation early next year. The US headquartered storage company said it has invested ₹800 crore in the campus that will act as its single largest R&D centre.

“We have plans to move to our own 15-acre campus. The land was acquired a while ago. We are building our own campus and will be moving to the new campus sometime next year. In phase I, we will be building one million sq.feet of office space. It will have 3,500 seats to start with,” Deepak Visweswaraiah, MD, Manageability Products Group, NetApp, told BusinessLine on the sidelines of an industry event Las Vegas.

US-based NetApp is a $6.3-billion company with over 150 offices around the world. NetApp currently has 1,900 people in its R&D teams.

Visweswaraiah said the R&D will be a centre of excellence for the global firm. “We are focussed on innovation to solve customer problems. We are focussed on data fabric and manageability. The new centre will enable collaborative work, besides having our entire team under one roof,” he added.

Global companies have been increasingly investing in commercial space.

Uptake in commercial space

Recently, pharmaceutical firm Abbott India bought 435,000 sq.ft commercial space from Godrej Developers in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex for ₹1,480 crore. Godrej BKC is a large high-end commercial real estate project with approximately 1.3 million sq. ft. of saleable area in Bandra-Kurla Complex.

Abbott said the new corporate office will allow it to consolidate existing offices and operations in Mumbai into a single location.

“India is one of the most important places in the world for Abbott, and we’re investing here accordingly,” Abbott Chairman and CEO Miles D White said in a statement. The new office will house its 1,500 employees. Abbott hopes to occupy the building in 2016.

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