Wipro, TCS unveil big plans for Hyd

Wipro invests Rs 300 crore in Manikonda facility, offers 30,000 jobs

Two of the India's IT majors, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro Technologies unveiled their plans to set up new facilities in the city today.

Chief minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy on Monday laid the foundation stone for the new campus proposed in a 100-acre land at Gopanapally by Wipro Technologies besides formally opening its new facility at Manikonda.

He also laid the foundation stone for the construction of new facility, Synergy Park, in 51 acres proposed by TCS Limited at the CMC campus. Wipro chairman Azim Premji and S Ramadorai, CEO and managing director of TCS, were present at the respective events.

Addressing the gathering at Wipro's Manikonda facility, the chief minister welcomed the company's growth plans being drawn up for Andhra Pradesh.

"Wipro wants to expand substantially in Hyderabad as well as in Vizag for which our government will extend all the needful support," Reddy said, adding that Wipro is going to create 30,000 jobs through its Andhra operations in the coming days.

Without going into details, Azim Premji said the company has large expansion plans both for Hyderabad and Vizag through large investments to build new facilities.

Together with Manikonda phase-1 facility which has 6 lakh square feet office space in 14 acre area, Wipro now has over 5,000 employees at Hyderabad development centres. Another 8-10 lakh square feet of office space is nearing completion. The company has invested about Rs 300 crore in Manikonda facility which currently houses 3,000 IT professionals.

Similarly, the company proposes to start construction work at the proposed 100 acre campus with an investment of over Rs 100 crore in phases from next month. The company plans to employ an additional 4,000-6,000 professionals for Andhra operations in the next 3 to 5 years.

In addition to these facilities, the state government has also agreed to provide another 250 acre land to Wipro for its future plans. Premji said besides being an IT entity, Wipro was also known for its soap brand to Andhra people who are the biggest buyers of 'Santoor' in the country.

The Synergy Park, which will have 3.35 lakh square feet office space once completed,ssssssss is alone expected to house 8,000 professionals. TCS currently employs about 4,000 IT professionals at Hyderabad development centres. After laying the foundation stone for the TCS facility, the chief minister released a software solution developed by TCS for the Andhra Pradesh Rural Employment Guarantee System (APREGS).

The web-enabled Information and Communication Technology solution has now gone live in over 658 mandals across 13 districts in the state where the employment guarantee scheme is being implemented.

The launch of the solution places the state in an enviable position of being the first state to implement an automated solution for the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.

The end-to-end ICT solution, will help in simplifying complex activities like the issue of job cards to rural households, identification of work to be undertaken, generation of work estimates, work execution and wage payment. Using the solution, the time taken to generate work estimates has been reduced from 15-20 days to minutes.

During his address at the Wipro facility, the chief minister sought the help of industry leaders in IT sector to fulfil his dream of covering 10,000 government schools with IT and IT enabled learning in rural areas.

"My government wants to mould and upgrade the existing education infrastructure in the state to suit the IT and BPO requirements so that my people will be able to get more and more employment opportunities in these growing sectors," he said, adding that the Jawahar Knowledge Centres operating in engineering colleges will be expanded to normal degree colleges to impart IT learning and soft skills to vast number of students in the coming days.

While the Wipro's operations at Hyderabad facilities achieved a turnover of Rs 1,221 crore during the year 2005-06, TCS' Hyderabad operations touched a turnover of Rs 600 crore during the same period.