Chennai emerging as India's Silicon Valley?
Chennai is home to either the largest or the second largest development centre of the top six software services exporters in the country. Hot handsets I Sexy iPods
By Rajesh Chandramouli, |
CHENNAI: There are no prizes for guessing which city is the IT capital of India. But interestingly, the build-up in Chennai has all the ingredients to knock Bangalore off centre stage.
Numbers suggests that Chennai will host the maximum number of software professionals in the country in three to five years.
Chennai is already home to either the largest or the second largest development centre of the top six software services exporters in the country. No other Indian city can boast of this. In fact, it's not just the premier league of TCS, Wipro, Infy and Cognizant, which is adding jobs in the city's IT corridor, even emerging contenders like MindTree, Mastek, Polaris, Patni, Hexaware and Tech Mahindra are expanding their base at a hectic pace along the east coast.
Numbers suggests that Chennai will host the maximum number of software professionals in the country in three to five years.
Chennai is already home to either the largest or the second largest development centre of the top six software services exporters in the country. No other Indian city can boast of this. In fact, it's not just the premier league of TCS, Wipro, Infy and Cognizant, which is adding jobs in the city's IT corridor, even emerging contenders like MindTree, Mastek, Polaris, Patni, Hexaware and Tech Mahindra are expanding their base at a hectic pace along the east coast.
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As of now, TCS, India's largest software services exporter with headquarters in Mumbai, has its largest development base in Chennai.
"We have 23,000 people spread across half a dozen centres in Chennai. Clearly, the city is the biggest for us. When our Siruseri campus (on the IT corridor) becomes ready in a few months, we will have infrastructure for another 21,000 seats across 70 acres," a TCS spokesperson said.
In the case of Infosys, official data on employment or infrastructure ramp-up were not made available. However, when the Mahindra City MoU was signed by the company in 2006, it had said it would create the "world's largest development centre" here with a seating capacity of 25,000 people.
While Wipro is dispersing its capacity addition to cities outside Bangalore, Dr K Chandra, who heads the centre in Chennai, said, "Of our 75,000 software jobs, 10,000 people are based in Chennai. This is without the BPO operations. Our plan is to increase this further. We will add infrastructure to seat another 35,000 people in the next three years. Our focus now is to divert businesses to other centres other than Bangalore and, more importantly, focus on tier-II cities."
Ditto for Cognizant. Tamil Nadu accounts for over 40% of its global headcount and 50% of personnel in India. As of December 2007, Cognizant had 22,000 professionals based in either Chennai or Coimbatore, out of the 55,000 worldwide. A Satyam spokesperson said, "We have around 9,000 people in the city and we will scale it up by another 6,000 in the next two years. I can���t tell you if Chennai operations will overtake Hyderabad, where we already have 21,000 people working."
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Going by the sheer size of plans and approvals Tamil Nadu has received till date, at least 37 IT special economic zones (SEZs) are expected to be built by private developers in the next few years, many of them for software companies planning dedicated campuses. To boot, there are 11 dedicated software parks being set up by state agencies. And over and above, there are 220 IT parks sanctioned by the state IT department. "We have given approvals for 73 million sq ft for IT parks alone," government sources said. Karnataka has sanctioned the setting-up of only 15 dedicated IT SEZs.
Courtesy:Times of India
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