India IBM's fastest growing country globally

Bangalore, Feb 1 (UNI) Recording twice the industry growth, IBM clocked a 37 per cent year on year growth in 2006 for the fourth consecutive year and continued to be IBM's fastest growing country globally.

Besides retaining market leadership in servers storage, IBM India was also rapidly growing marketshare in software and services, IBM Regional General Manager Shanker Annaswamy told newsmen here today.

He said with additional ten new IBM global delivery centres set up last year, India became IBM's larget global delivery location with as many as 35 centres in the country.

He said the company's employee strength reached 53,000 in January and had trained more than 700 business partners last year and was present in 200 towns and cities in India either directly or through its 2500 business partners.

He said during the current year IBM would continue to enhance partnerships with government on egovernance and other projects to bridge the digital divide. it would also strengthen services science curriculum with Indian universities besides the IT ecosystem in the country through globally benchmarked programmes including reinventing education and kidsmart programmes.

IBM last year announced a six billion dollar investment in India spread over three years. It had set up its first semiconductor research and development enablement centre here, the first of its kind outside the US to deliver high quality state of the art compact models and innovate to develop new modelling techniques to capture new physics in nano dimension semiconductor devices.

Referring to its efforts in bridging digital he said the company had imparted training on open standards based technologies to more than 80,000 students in 745 colleges across the country last year.

In addition through its Great Mind Challenge programme, 21,800 students from 700 colleges in 24 states had participated.

UNI