Tata Elxsi to open R&D centre in Pune
Business Standard — March 24, 2006

Tata Elxsi has announced the setting up of a development centre in Pune. The "centre of excellence" will work in the lines of Tata Elxsi's existing global design centers in India and will assist global customers in product designing, development of networks and communications technologies, such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Wireless LAN, routing and embedded networking.

Elaborating on Tata Elxsi's business activities, Nitin Pai, head of marketing for product design services said, "Apart from networking and communications Tata Elxsi offers its services that include automotive, consumer and office products, semiconductors, storage, scientific instrumentation and media."

"Digitisation, special effects and animation are gaining importance in the media, thus creating newer avenues for us. We cater to this sector with our visual computing lab and with increasing demand for special effects and 3D animation in movies, we are exploring a huge business opportunity in this field," Pai said.

The centre will be initially manned by 100 engineers and this capacity will be increased over the next six to eight months, Satyanarayan added.

"The centre will have full fledged infrastructure including a specialised lab for networking and work as multiple offshore competency centre to deliver long term value to our customers," said Prakash Satyanarayan, general manager, Tata Elxsi.

Reacting to a query on the prospects of the company's merger with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) or Tata Technologies Ltd (TTL), Pai said the three companies are engaged in different areas: "Tata Elxsi is a zero debt, cash-positive public company. Though the work structure is similar, we do styling whereas TTL focuses more on technology. We can't comment when and whether the merger will happen."

Unlike us TTL does not do embedded software development, thus, we can't comment when and whether the merger will happen."

Tata Elxsi's revenue last year was Rs 185 crore. The company has reached a turnover of Rs165 crore in the nine months ended December 2005 and hopes to cross the mark of Rs. 200 crore by March 2006.