IIHT aims at 500 Indian centres

To expand into China

Indian Institute of Hardware Technology, a Bangalore-headquartered IT hardware training firm, aims to open 500 centres in the country by 2007. The institute has ambitious plans of entering China too where it has set itself a target of 100 centres by 2009, a company release said.

IIHT, which has 140 centres and seven regional offices in India, will start its first international operation, in China, later this year. It will invest some $2 million there to on opening its centres.

With China "nurturing itself as a major hub for sourcing technical manpower", IIHT was eyeing its training market, Keshav Raju N, chief executive officer of the company said.

The company's business, retail and corporate training and certification in hardware and networking, grew 40 per cent to touch Rs 36 crore for the year to March 2005.

"We aim to cross Rs 50 crore this fiscal and Rs 100 crore for fiscal 2008," Raju said. IIHT aims to more than double its business in North India both in revenues and number of centres, the release said.

Buoyed by its recent success in the North, IIHT's future investment in the region will include an R&D facility "to create a pool of well-groomed technocrats on all emerging technologies".

It will include a facility to retrain the franchise centres' faculty regularly, an examination and certification cell and a 3-tier placement cell to provide good placement service, the release said.

IIHT's training covers areas like hardware, system administration and network administration, information security, database administration, and communication engineering.

It offers an "extensive library" of both vendor-neutral and vendor-specific information technology (IT) curricula. Its courses are both product-based and technology based, the release said.

The company has "global tie-ups" with firms like Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SCO, CompTIA, Red Hat, Novell, Thomson Prometric and VUE. Demand in India today was for between five lakh and six lakh hardware engineers.

BPOs and call centre firms are fuelling the demand growth absorbing 35 per cent of the engineers as technical support associates, the release said.