SAP to hire 4,000 employees by '06

Leading business software solutions provider SAP today said it plans to double its headcount in India to 4,000 by 2006.

SAP Labs India, has the largest development facility outside Germany and rates India among the top eight strategic markets.

On his first visit to India, Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group and member of executive board, SAP AG, announcing the hiring of 2,000 more people and said the additional staff would be from India and not "at the expense of other places".

Presently, SAP's Bangalore facility, among the four global development hubs, accounts for 20% of the company's 10,000 developers globally, he said.

Agassi also announced the opening of SAP's first netweaver center of excellence at SAP Labs campus in Bangalore.

The centre would facilitate the process of educating SAP partners in India and Asia-Pacific on the SAP netweaver platform to enable faster adoption of Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), he said.

SAP Netweaver is an open integration and application platform and technical enabler of ESA, which is a blueprint for implementing enterprise-scale business solutions and flexible IT infrastructures by leveraging web services and other open standards, company officials said.

SAP has invested euro 20 million to build phases 1 and II of the India development centre and already announced it would invest euro 20 million more for phase III of the SAP Lab Campus.