Symphony opens 4th dev centre in India

As part of its growing focus on India, Symphony Services, a global provider of collaborative, global outsourcing solutions for commercial-grade software and embedded product engineering lifecycle, has announced the opening of its second development centre in Bangalore.

Called 'Symphony Innovation and Excellence Centre', the new facility is part of the company's $150 million expansion plan announced earlier that include the expansion of its Pune facility and the newly inaugurated facility in Mumbai.

The new centre having a bulit-up area of 2 lakh sq. ft., has a sitting capacity of 2,000. While part of the building will be used for the core outsourced product development work, the other part will be dedicated for the analytics based knowledge process outsourcing, an emerging area of opportunity for the US-headquartered company.

"We have recently doubled our capacity in Pune and moved to a new location in Mumbai. Symphony Innovation and Excellence Centre will be the second facility in Bangalore, the first being the Symphony Technology Centre in the heart of the city, and the fourth development centre in India," said Gordon Brooks, CEO and president, Symphony Services.

Earlier, the company which reached $100 million revenue in 2005, had announced strengthening of its top management team by promoting Ajay Kela, former president of its India operations to the position of chief operating officer (COO) and managing director.

The company had also inducted four vice-presidents, besides getting a new chief technology officer in the US and promoting four senior global directors to the position of associate vice-president.

Amitava Roy, who was a senior corporate vice president at HCL Technologies, has joined as the new president, India operations in place of Kela.

Currently, Symphony has about 3,000 professionals based out of its four development centres in India, with the bulk of its operations being carried out at Bangalore. In Pune, the company which had established its presence in 2004 with the acquisition of InReality, has around 320 employees and in Mumbai about 130 employees.

Brooks said that while maintaining the growth momentum in Bangalore, the company was looking for both Pune and Mumbai to strengthen its position in analytics space.

"While Pune is a right place with a key provider of engineering talents, Mumbai is a very good place to work in the analytics space with people having business domain expertise. We are drawn by the way where we can get the right talents," he added.

Symphony has been growing at a compounded growth rate of 170 per cent for the last three years.