Sungard plans software base in India

MUMBAI, OCT 4: Close on the heels of Intel Corporation's announcement to set up a software development centre in India, another billion d...

MUMBAI, OCT 4: Close on the heels of Intel Corporation’s announcement to set up a software development centre in India, another billion dollar IT firm Sungard Data Systems (SDS) has finalised plans to set up a software facility in India. The group specialises in computer disaster recovery services and proprietary investment support systems.

The company did not have a presence in India until two months ago when it set up a branch office. For the purpose of doing software development it now plans to set up a subsidiary at Bangalore and is currently in the process of applying for Foreign Investment Promotion Board permission. The group has 70 companies in its fold and proposes to source a significant amount of development from here.

With this nearly every global IT player is sourcing software from India. SAP the world leader in Enterprise Resource Planning has invested close to 11 lakh at SAP Labs, its research and development facility in the country. This is its fifth development centre in the world.

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RDBMS vendor Informix is currently doing development for its flagship product, Dynamic Server, in India. It not only has its own development centre but also works in alliance with domestic software company Melstar, which has an Informix dedicated centre. In Intel’s case, India will work on two focus areas, the platform components group and information technology group.

The world’s largest and second largest software companies, Microsoft and Computer Associates, also do software development from India. Microsoft was reported as saying most of its developers at Redmond were Indians anyway. Its centre at Hyderabad does development for its core product and reports directly to Redmond rather than Microsoft India. Microsoft arch rival Oracle has two development centres in India – one at Bangalore and the other at Hyderabad.

Texas Instruments, Motorola, IBM, Verifone, Oracle, Baan and Intergraph are some of the other multinational giants who have established software facilities here. This is apart, close to 200 Fortune 500 companies contract software projects to Indian companies with General Electric being the single largest customer.

Sungard is likely to establish the subsidiary through group company Infinity. Infinity has products in the area of treasury and risk management. R Raghunathan, who was earlier with SAP and IBM, has been appointed as country manager for India and SriLanka. Raghunathan confirmed that a liason office would be set up before the year end.

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