Cisco India campous first phase to open in July: Official

Bangalore, May 22 (UNI) The first phase of the US Dollar 50 Million campus of global networking major Cisco Systems (India) will be opened in July this year, Company Managing Director S Devarajan said today.

Speaking to UNI, he said the one million sq ft campus on the sprawling 14-acre plot on Outer Ring Road near Sarjapur on the outskirts of city would accommodate 10,000 engineers once fully completed.

"We have already shifted a batch of our engineers to our campus.

We have big plans for India and we will be scaling up the headcount to 10,000 in three to four years from the present 2500. Our expansion process will continue further even after the completion of this campus. We are going to invest one billion dollars in India in phases," he said.

Mr Devarajan said Cisco had opted to set up its R and D campus in Bangalore due to the huge resource of knowledge based workers. "We came here due to talent available in this city and the cost factor did not bother us," he said.

The Cisco India Chief said in tune with the reverse brain drain that had resulted in Indian working in US coming back home, many Indian born professionals working in Cisco's headquarters in the San Jose, California might opt to work in the Indian campus. "You can't stop them. They will obviously attracted to work from India," he said.

Cisco first established its global R and D facility in the city in 1998. An extension of Cisco's global R and D efforts based in San Jose, the centre had been involved in core product research and development and engineering across Cisco's entire product family. It was the largest development centre for the company outside the US.

The new campus would support staff from Cisco's research and Development, IT, Sales and Customer Support teams in India.

UNI