February 6, 2008
The move by the Silicon Valley giant is a vote of confidence in the midst of uncertainty around the Indian IT sectorRhys Blakely, Bombay
Cisco, Silicon Valley's largest company, has massively accelerated its Indian expansion drive, planning to train to 360,000 engineers in the country to deploy its technologies by 2013. It would be a sixfold increase.
The IT hardware giant, which last year opened a new campus in Bangalore as part of a $1 billion Indian investment strategy, makes the lion's share of its profits from routers and switches, the hardware that forms the backbone of the internet and of corporate computer systems.
Cisco predicts that increased use of the web, especially for video applications, will require a multi-billion-dollar scheme of upgrades to the world's current online infrastructure - plus a vastly expanded pool of trained labour to install them.
A series of new ventures designed to dramatically boost the number of Indians certified to roll-out Cisco products will include a new fleet of mobile training and testing centres that will patrol India's rural outreaches. The company also plans to increase its direct workforce in the county more than threefold, to 10,000, by 2010.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article3319835.ece~snip~ "Against this background, Cisco's plans to train a new generation of Indian engineers yesterday drew fire from their prospective Western peers, who suggested the drive to train Indian graduates would ultimately lead to a flood of labour into developed economies.
One person wrote on a comments board on an online industry publication. "360,000 Indian Network specialists soon to deluge the US market."
"I can see the lobbying – 'America isn't producing enough network specialists, so we need these folks to keep the economy going'."