i2 to hike hiring

i2 Technologies, the global provider of closed look supply chain management solution, will move into a new campus near the airport by the end of this year.

Phase I of the campus will be able to accommodate around 1,500 people, while the next stages of the construction will create space for another 1,000. The campus will bring together the 1,100 people they have on their rolls in India.

"India handles around 60 per cent of the development work right now and we will scale that up. Consulting is around 50 per cent and that will be increased to 70 per cent. We are happy with the support ratio of 80 per cent out of India," said Pallab Chatterjee, president - solutions operations, i2.

Explaining expansion plans, Sankalp Saxena, managing director, i2 India said, "Most of the hiring in future will be on the support side. We will set up dedicated support centres for Dell, Nokia and Infineon Technologies out of India."

The company also spoke extensively about composite applications and the way it could change the way enterprise applications work. Their own product in the market in the area, called Supply Chain Operating Services, launched a year ago has 20 customers to date.

It is being handled by TCS in India. Composite applications and data management solutions though are offered by many a competitor, including SAP.

When asked about this Chatterjee said, "SAP believes that their data model is the gold data model. They have a master-slave data model around which everything has to be constructed. Both Nokia and Infineon are SAP clients, but they chose to throw their data management solution out and pick ours. That speaks of our product's value."

The ailing company ran into trouble around two years ago with its revenue filings and an investigation was launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), US, around the same period. Though the re-audit was completed some time back and SEC finished their investigation three months ago, the company's balance sheet remains in the red.

The company reported a net loss of $7.0 million or $0.02 loss per share for the fourth quarter of 2004 as compared to a net income of $15.8 million, or $0.03 earnings per share, for the fourth quarter of 2002.

Total fourth quarter revenues were $98 million compared to $168.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2002. When asked if the company would manage a turnaround this fiscal, Chatterjee refused to comment as "we cannot make forward looking statements".