Accenture Ltd, the world's No 1 consulting firm, said on Thursday it will hire another 1,500 employees to make its Indian technology centre a strategic hub as clients seek more value for money.

Accenture, tapping an army of low-cost engineers in India, aims to more than double its Indian software and back-office staff to 2,500 within two years, country marketing head Ashish Bhushan told Reuters in a telephone interview on Thursday.

The consulting giant's big push into India comes at a time when rival Indian software services giants, including Infosys Technologies and Wipro, are seeking a bigger share of software spending from global clients.

Bermuda-based Accenture, which provides management and technology consulting services, currently has 1,000 employees in India, where it started off in 2001 in Bombay. It expanded into Bangalore last November.

Domestic players, who gained an early lead with the help of low-cost local engineers, now compete for both talent and business with global firms like Accenture, EDS and IBM for multi-million dollar, long-term outsourcing contracts.

"India is a key location in our global network of strategic delivery centres," Bhushan said.

Leading players in the global IT services sector, including IBM, Computer Sciences Corp and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young , have all been expanding at a furious pace in India.

Accenture, which serves more than 45 clients from India, is hiring people with from one to 10 years of experience, Bhushan said.

Aided by high-speed telecom networks, India's software revolution is being driven by engineers and other English-speaking graduates who can be hired for a fraction of what their counterparts earn overseas.

Much of the work is in projects billed by the hour.

Last week, Accenture formed an alliance with the call centre unit of Indian software service exporter MphasiS BFL to tap into the fast-growing back-office services area.

"This a non-exclusive agreement," Bhushan said, but declined to give more details of the tie-up. Accenture currently had no plans for other alliances, he said.

Indian firms are emerging as one-stop service shops combining software with back-office work like payroll services.

But these companies have a long way to catch up with overseas peers who boast annual sales of billions of dollars. No Indian software company has annual revenue of more than $900 million.

India's software and related exports grew 29 per cent to $7.5 billion in 2001/02 (April-March) after growing 50 percent a year in the late 1990s. The industry sees 30 percent growth this year.

Accenture was spun off from accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP in 1989. It employs 75,000 workers in 46 countries and had revenues of $13.1 billion in the year ended August 2002.