EMC Corporation, the leading information storage systems, software, networks and services company, said it will increase the headcount at its India software development and support centre from 40 to 100 by the year-end.

Announcing the details, Chris Gahagan, senior vice-president, storage infrastructure software, EMC Corporation said, "We will continue to utilise the intellectual assets of Bangalore. Nearly 75 per cent of these engineers will be involved in the development of new software, while the rest will be deployed on maintenance."

In January, this year, EMC began full fledged operations of its development centre after it acquired Sanware's intellectual assets in Bangalore. Sanware was dealing with back up and restore software and storage resource management.

Post acquisition, EMC had absorbed Sanware's team of 20 and had announced its plans to double the number in 12 months. Having doubled its staff well in advance, EMC is confident of hiring more engineers by the year-end.

Gahagan said EMC has earmarked significant investments for its Bangalore operations as it would deal with software development. Last year, EMC had invested $778 million on R&D. "The total investment on R&D during the current year would be similar to the previous year and our development centre in Bangalore will receive significant investments," he added.

Currently, the expanded team of engineers will relocate to a new state-of-the-art "multi-million dollar facility" in Bangalore, which will be fully dedicated to further development and support of EMC storage software solutions.

Quoting IDC figures, Gahagan said there was a continuous demand for cost-effective storage networks. "We will continue to see a reduction in disk drive cost per megabyte. Today its is 0.2 cents per MB and it is likely to reduce to 0.1 cents by 2010," he said.

Gahagan said it will strengthen its relationship with Brocade and Cisco Systems, where it deploys software on to the hardware developed by the latter.