Microsoft and JP Morgan Share Expansion Plans for India

During the same week that Intel announced it was pumping up investment in India, Microsoft and JP Morgan Chase & Co. did the same.

This Reuters article said Microsoft plans to “pour $1.7 billion into India over the next four years.” According to the story, Chairman Bill Gates made the announcement at a news conference and said the company, which already has 4,000 people in India, would be adding another 3,000 “over the next several years.”

Mr. Gates said Microsoft would focus on “research to help the spread of low-cost computing in India.”

In related news, Satyam Computer Services, with headquarters in India, and Microsoft jointly announced an industry enterprise readiness initiative, called EDGE, aimed at training and certifying Satyam’s engineering workforce on Microsoft products, using Microsoft learning products. The goal of EDGE is to train up to 3,000 Satyam employees and have them certify on Microsoft’s .NET technology. The company has about 22,000 employees and 429 global customers.

JP Morgan Chase & Co. said it plans to move “nearly a third of its...back office and support staff offshore by the end of 2007,” according to a report in the Financial Times. That’s a doubling of its staff size in India. The growth will happen, according to Reuters, by hiring “4,500 graduates in India over the next two years, mostly in Bangalore.” The company said these will be additional staff, not replacement staff.

The company also has operations in Mumbai and is hiring between 300 and 400 graduates a month currently.

The operations in the two cities will process “much of JP Morgan’s foreign exchange business.” The company is preparing to transfer processing of credit derivatives contracts as well.