DigitalThink plans major shift to Hyderabad centre

DigitalThink India, a fully-owned subsidiary of the US-based $43 million DigitalThink Inc, is planning to shift a majority of its custom courseware development and content delivery work, which is presently being carried out of in its US centre, to its Hyderabad centre.

The company, which provides custom e-learning solutions, has two development centres in the country "� one each at Hyderabad and Bangalore.

"We are chalking out major plans for our Indian operations which consist of ramping up of our manpower at the two centres, especially at Hyderabad which will be termed as our India development centre," Larry Blair, vice-president (professional services) of DigitalThink Inc, said at a press conference here today.

"We also plan to invest a substantial amount of money on the Hyderabad centre," he added, without disclosing the amount of proposed investment.

DigitalThink started its Indian operations by acquiring two Indian firms "� city-based LearningByte International and Kolkata-based TCT "� two years back. Out of the company's global manpower of 400, over 200 are working in India with about 140 in the Hyderabad centre.

"Through the courseware developed over thousands of hours, we have finetuned a process methodology that produces the most effective custom e-learning courses, ranging from off-the-shelf content catalogue to innovative 3-D simulation training. We not only deliver content over the web, but also develop a total learning environment that is both interactive and collaborative," Blair said.

"We invested $50 million in delivery infrastructure and R&D with 6,000 course hours of content developed by our team," Blair said. The six-year-old company has so far delivered about 6.1 million courses.