Invensys plans to ramp up Hyderabad centre

Invensys Plc, the £3.89-billion automation, control and process solutions company, expects to ramp up its software development centre in Hyderabad.

Invensys, which does not have a manufacturing facility yet in the country, also indicated that it might look at the option of sourcing components for its manufacturing practice from India.

Addressing a media gathering in the city, Richard Neil Haythornthwaite, chief executive officer, Invensys Plc said that going forward the company's software development centre in Hyderabad could start looking at new product development.

"It is the next logical stage of evolution. From doing work on process systems, the software development work could expand to cover our controls business also," Haythornthwaite said.

Invensys, which inherited the Hyderabad development centre courtesy its acquisition of enterprise software provider, BAAN, has grown the centre rapidly. "We have grown the Invensys Development Centre rapidly from 20 people to 220 people in two years. By the end of this year, we expect the centre to have about 300 employees," Haythornthwaite said.

Significantly, Haythornthwaite pointed out that going forward, Invensys was not inclined to directly add to its software developer headcount elsewhere in the world and growth will happen only at its Indian centre.

Invensys employs close to 35,000 employees worldwide, out of which about 23,000 are in its manufacturing division while the rest of them are in the software division.

The company offers solutions that increase productivity, reduce waste, remove cost from supply chain, increase profitability and demonstrate measurable improvement in the overall performance.

The Invensys Development Centre (IDC) in Hyderabad was set up in April 2002 to cater to the software development, quality assurance and support of the various Invensys products.

The main objectives of IDC are to retain the intellectual property within the company and to augment the current development and support groups in the US. IDC is the only centre in the world where Invensys has employees working for global solutions development in one place.

Invensys also has a development centre in Mumbai. This centre has around 13-plus engineers supporting the Global Solutions Development Group.