The storage company will pump $25m into its Hyderabad and Bangalore centres during the next four years

Storage-gear maker Adaptec plans to expand its research and development operations in India.

Adaptec plans to pump $25m (£13.88m) into its centres in Hyderabad and Bangalore during the next four years. The company said this week that the move is intended to help it meet "aggressive development schedules" for products including new chips and Internet Protocol storage and external storage wares for its manufacturing customers in North America and for those in other regions -- Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia -- that account for 65 percent of Adaptec's revenue.

The new investment will see doubling of management and engineering teams at the two existing centres, up from a total of about 75 employees currently, and construction of new engineering labs and test facilities.

Adaptec is among the large number of companies that have begun developing new products and technologies in India, taking advantage of locally available engineering talent and India's proximity to markets in Asia and Europe. Recently, Google and America Online have been making plans to set up engineering centres in India.

"India has become a technology centre that enables us to work much more closely with key partners and (manufacturers) such as Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems," said a statement from Raghu Allamsetty, managing director of Adaptec's India operations. "

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