HP, arguably the World’s largest IT company, has opened two out of the four new IT outsourcing facilities it plans to add in India this year.
The two facilities, part of its plan to make India one of its six global hubs for services, will provide Infrastructure (technology) Outsourcing services for HP’s global clientbase, it said.
In all, it is set to inaugurate 4 new buildings in 2011 to house its burgeoning Indian IT workforce — three in Bangalore and one in Chennai — totalling a whopping 500,000 square feet.
It said it remained committed to meeting its expansion target for India.
HP, which was primarily a computer maker seven or eight years ago, burst on to the services market after it found its main competitor IBM make the transition profitably even as the hardware market became commoditized.
Despite acquiring the IT services firm EDS, HP ‘Best Shore’ Services is still estimated to have only around 200,000 services employees, or about half of what IBM has. The latter is estimated to have 25-30% of its workforce in India.
HP’s announcement of making India a “Best Shore Hub” — its market term for a services hub — was seen as an effort to similarly take advantage of the mature, cheap and abundant IT services talent base in the country.
Its other former-hardware-turned hybrid competitor, such as Dell too had announced an aggressive plan to make India its hub for services.
The annoucement has come barely two months after Microsoft unveiled a sprawling 154,000 square feet facility in Bangalore.
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