Search the Internet          Tips  Sites: Finance, Investment

TCS to move into bioinformatics market

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company by revenue and exports, on Monday announced its entry into bioinformatics, which involves developing software tools to analyse biological data.

TCS has signed up with the Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, a state-sponsored laboratory, to jointly work on bioinformatics, senior TCS officials told a news conference.

"We believe this is the time for investing in R&D for bioinformatics and creating assets by way of skill sets and R&D products," said TCS managing director S Ramadorai.

He did not elaborate on how much TCS will spend on the move, but said the expenditure will come out of its R&D budget, which is around 5 per cent of annual turnover.

TCS, a division of Tata Sons, the private holding company of one of the country's leading conglomerates the Tata group, had revenue of Rs 31.42 billion for the year ended March.

Ramadorai also said he would not hazard a guess on the value of the bioinformatics market or how much TCS expected to earn from it.

"It looks like a very interesting potential area for investment and the fallout can be enormous," he said.

M Vidyasagar, executive vice-president of TCS's Advanced Technology Centre in Hyderabad, said CDFD will assist TCS in training its staff to analyse biological data.

It will begin by training 25 to 30 people each year, and help TCS identify potential software products.

"There are several niche software products that TCS can deliver with the help of CDFD. We expect the first software product to be released by early 2002," he said.

As part of the agreement, TCS will also fund some of CDFC's R&D projects, he said.

At a later stage, TCS may also explore partnerships with pharmaceutical companies to develop software tools to analyse the data they gather for new drug discovery, he said.

Tell us what you think of this report