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Bentley plans to make Kolkata its software development hub
(Financial Express Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The US-based $400-million company, Bentley Systems, which provides solution for oil & gas and mining & construction businesses, has decided to make Kolkata one of its principal software development hubs besides Pune in India, according to BA Aravinda, marketing manager, South Asia. Bentley also has small development centres in Chennai, New Delhi and Mumbai. Two years back, Bentley bought the structural analysis software, STAAD, from Kolkata-based Research Engineers Inc valued at $23.5 million, according to various press reports. The senior executives of the company did not comment on the price. The job of the Kolkata development centre will be to do structural analysis using STAAD for jobs in the mining and construction segment as well as to integrate various kinds of software built in other development centres around the world. Recently, the company rented 15000 sqft at Rajarhat which will house around 150 software engineers in the next one year's time, Aravinda said. At present, Kolkata has 70 people while Pune has 150. Alan Savin, vice-president of Bentley Systems, said the US development centre has the largest number of software developers, followed by Indian centres. "We believe as we go along expanding our operation, Indian operation is becoming extremely crucial for us. But one of the issues we are facing is dearth of good people who have the knowledge of both software as well mining engineering," he said. Globally, the company has around 2800 people, 60% of them in software development related work. Savin said with the mining market in India is opening up and more than 90% of mines under private sector, Bentley has the opportunity to expand its business. Though Bentley executives are not ready to share their India revenue figure, they said around 30% of the worldwide revenue is from Asia Pacific and out of the Asia Pacific revenue, South Asia's contribution is 12-15%. "We believe that the software development work in Pune and Kolkata is crucial to our growth here and outside India. We will aggressively recruit people in these two centres to provide best of the solutions to the mining and construction industry," Savin said.
Copyright 2007 The Indian Express Online Media Ltd, Source: The Financial Times Limited
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