Well.... here it is in black and white from the Southern Cina Morning
Post........

Love the quote from Mr williams...!


Business software giant Oracle said that it planned to nearly double its
staff in India in the next four years and has started hiring for a unit that
would provide back-office services for its global operations.
"It is quite likely that we'll grow to 4,000 over the next four years,"
Derek Williams, executive vice-president in charge of the Asia-Pacific
region for Oracle, told a news conference late on Tuesday.


He was speaking after the inauguration of the second phase of a sprawling
building in the southern city of Bangalore, India's technology capital,
which houses 1,200 of Oracle's 2,200 Indian workers, most of whom are
software engineers.

Oracle, the world's second-largest software company after Microsoft,
announced 200 development job cuts in Silicon Valley last month, and
analysts said that 600 more could be laid off.

Asked if jobs were being moved from the United States to India to cut costs,
Mr Williams said the expansion in India was part of the company's overall
expansion strategy.

"We obviously put our development facilities in the country that makes most
sense," he said. "Costs are important but not as much important as
intellectual capital."

The Bangalore building will be home to a "shared services" unit providing
back-office services, such as accounting, staff management and payroll. It
will initially employ 70 people.

"We'll be setting up a shared services operation for Oracle here and then
perhaps a customer support operation," Mr Williams said, adding the centre
would back up work in Oracle's existing centres in Dublin, Sacramento and
Sydney.

Oracle also planned a separate Internet sales unit in India that would use
the Web to boost marketing, he said.

Attracted by relatively low-paid English-speaking graduates, global firms
are setting up back-office units in India. They have been joined by
independent local firms offering similar services to companies overseas
using high-speed telecommunications links.

Ranjan Chak, vice-president in Oracle for product services in Asia, said
that the company had already tested collaboration between global employees
over telecommunications in developing software products, and had set the way
for other work using a similar model.

"From that we have shown that it works," Mr Chak said.

Oracle officials said that the Bangalore facility would have communication
links capable of transmitting 45 megabits per second, said to be the highest
bandwidth used by a private sector firm.

Oracle set up an Indian software centre in 1994 in Bangalore and followed it
with another in Hyderabad. It also has a separate global consulting
organisation and support centre based in India.

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