Chennai: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) plans to recruit 1,500 consultants for its Chennai operations over the next one year and has taken a decision which will see Chennai becoming the epicentre for all telecom projects.

The company, which is slated to come out with a Rs 4,000 crore public offer soon, also said that Chennai was being sold to many of its clients as the ideal destination for disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

TCS, executive vice president, S Mahalingam, told newspersons that Chennai was in the forefront of all activities that TCS undertook in the areas of BFSI (Banking, Finance, Securities and Insurance) and Telecom.

"We plan to recruit about 1,500 personnel this year for our Chennai operations and about 500 would be exclusively for the telecom domain".

Telecom is one of the strong focus areas for TCS and contributes about 20 per cent to the total revenues of the company.

TCS has revenues in the region of $1 billion and the telecom business unit has 29 clients which include 20 service provider clients and nine equipment vendor clients.

Ravi Viswanathan, head telecom practice of TCS, said the slowdown which afflicted telecom equipment vendors was still continuing.

"We do not see any recovery yet, and there is no clear scenario emerging" he said. TCS, like other leading Indian software companies, had very lucrative development contracts with the likes of Nortel and Lucent.

But with the technology slowdown in the US hitting telecom vendors very hard Indian software companies also faced the brunt with new projects either being shelved temporarily or totally abandoned, apart from a resultant squeeze on billing rates.

TCS also said that it was seeing a lot of traction for system integration projects in Asia-Pacific and the margins were as good or better than what the company could have got at this point of time either in US or Europe.