Global e-commerce firm eBay Inc formally inaugurated its second global development centre in India here on Thursday.
The centre, which has been informally operational since May this year, will employ 700 technologists in addition to its existing workforce of over 300, the company announced. This expansion will be spread out over three years.
Along with the 2,000-employee strong development centre in Chennai, this unit will host “centres of excellence” across several tech domains for both eBay and PayPal, said Ken Moss, Vice-President of Technology and Sciences, eBay Marketplaces. Research and development here will be focussed on application and products, big data and analytics, user interface design and mobile. The Bangalore centre is among 16 global development centres that contribute to the back-end of eBay’s giant e-commerce interface.
Mr. Moss added that innovations coming out of its India centres will be “key drivers” of eBay’s future expansions, world-wide. “India plays a key role in eBay’s vision to transform commerce, as lines between the offline and online continue to blur,” he says. He added that the jobs that will be created here will be “high-end technology jobs.”
Speaking at the inaugural, State Minister for IT/BT, S.R. Patil, said that the opening of the centre reconfirms our place on the world map for global products and tech innovation that brings hundreds of jobs to the State.
Striking a different note, Secretary to the Department of IT and BT, Srivathsa Krishna, asked the eBay management why their expansion plans were restricted to a “mere 1,000”. “A thousand over three years is a slower growth rate than many brick and mortar companies in the U.S. We hope that eBay will expand more, and specifically to tier-II and tier-III cities, which host both talent and skill,” he emphasised.
