Intec moving some R&D work to India from Australia

Sufia Tippu
Wednesday, 02 August 2006 17:36

IT Industry - Market

UK-based telecom billing solutions firm, Intec, has invested $10 million in India to expand its operations as well as to set up a center of excellence in Bangalore. The new Indian center will take over some R&D work currently being done in Australia.

Intec, whose customers include AT&T, Bellsouth, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Deutsche Telecom, Telstra, Vodafone, offers mission critical enterprise solutions to over 380 of the world’s largest communications companies.

Although the company has been present in India since the past two years, there is a sudden spurt of activity taking place here.

From merely 20 employees last year, the Indian centre has now 250 people and plans to nearly double this by the end of 2007 .

Says Scott Winks, vice president, professional services, center of excellence, “Building our offshore centre in Bangalore is already paying off. We already have a few success stories here with our customers –one each in Greece, Asia, UK and Africa being serviced from here.”

Against the backdrop of the high growth Indian telecom scenario, Intec has outlined a two-pronged strategy – not only to set up a center of excellence which would provide its development team an additional highly skilled workforce but also to tweak its products and offer them to Indian telecom service providers.

Known more by its product name of SingleView, the company would be implementing its solutions as part of its professional services -- billing, mediation, activation, rating and charging -- from India.

Apart from the Bangalore center, the company has four centers of excellence in Brisbane, Atlanta, CapeTown and Copenhagen. “We are also looking at moving some of our R&D work which has been till now been done in Brisbane and other centers to India,” Winks said.

Meanwhile, in India the company has provided its retail billing solution to leading service providers such as government-owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) and Reliance. It is also working with other service providers such as Bharti, BSNL and Hutch for different types of telecom solutions.

“Having a development center close on hand goes a long way in helping us build solutions around the products we offer to Indian service providers,” adds Rathi Dasgupta, general manager – Intec India.