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By Dinesh C Sharma, 20 April 2004 08:05

NEWS 3Com on Monday said it plans to open an engineering design centre next month in Hyderabad, India.

The centre will focus on voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, networking technology currently being developed at the company's facilities in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and in Marlborough and Andover, Massachusetts, the company said.

Last year, 3Com said it would focus its internal engineering strength on products such as VoIP and application-specific integrated circuit chips, and farm out other work to offshore locations. It also set up a new product design house in Taiwan to manage the design and manufacturing of its low-price, high-volume products.

3Com said the Indian centre will work on VoIP software features and application development, while the teams in the United States are focused on VoIP architecture and product development. Officials said the centre should eventually employ 50 to 100 workers, and a similar number of workers will be added in the United States.

"The leading-edge R&D [will be] developed in North America," said Liam Kiely, vice president of engineering at 3Com. "Anything devoted to testing maintenance and so on we're bringing on in India."

A number of US corporations have announced plans either to set up new engineering centres or to expand their existing centres in Indian technology hubs such as Bangalore and Hyderabad. The idea is to take advantage of locally available engineering talent and India's proximity to markets in Asia Pacific and Europe. In January, storage gear maker Adaptec unveiled plans to pump $25m into two centres - in Hyderabad and Bangalore - over the next four years. Workers at the centres will develop new chips, IP storage tools and external storage products.

VoIP enables telephone calls over the internet and telephone companies fear that adoption of the technology could eat into their revenues.

Dinesh C Sharma writes for CNET News.com.