Google Inc, the world's largest internet search engine, has opened its engineering research and development centre in Bangalore to under take projects in data mining, data warehousing, business intelligence and knowledge management.
This centre is Google's first full-fledged engineering facility outside the US. The company is also setting up a customer support centre in Hyderbad.
While the company seems to be tightlipped about this development, it was confirmed by B V Naidu, director, Software Technology Parks of India.
According to Naidu, "The approvals for setting up the R&D centre was given a fortnight ago and Google has already started recruiting people."
The new centre will have a number of software engineers, top programmers and visionary computer scientists. Though Naidu did not reveal the investment being made by Google, Business Standard has learnt that it is initially investing nearly $4 million.
The company has registered with the STPI in Bangalore. It is also understood that the centre will be headed by a 3-member team, which includes Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist, Antoine Colaco, manager, and Narayanan Shiva Kumar.
They come from Google's headquarters at Mountain View, California. It may be noted that Bharat was instrumental in launching Google News search engine.
Naidu added that besides cost advantage, Google preferenc of Bangalore as a location is the availability of high-skilled engineers and scientists.
Google's Bangalore centre is believed to be working on problems in areas such as distributed systems, information retrieval and scalability issues related to dealing with huge amounts of data and a rapidly increasing user base. The centre would also work on technologies and products applicable to the Indian audience.
Though the company is not shifting jobs from the US, its Indian team has not officially disclosed the commencement of operations fearing backlash on outsourcing in the US.
