Right after a multi-billion dollar acquisition, Salesforce bets big on India

Photo credit: Patrick Savalle.

Salesforce is the latest to be drawn to India’s large pool of high caliber tech talent. Within a week of its US$2.8 billion acquisition of Demandware, the US tech giant today announced the setting up of a new center in India which will employ 1,000 enterprise software engineers and customer service representatives.

The Salesforce center coming up in Hyderabad will be one of its largest outside its headquarters in San Francisco. It will become operational by the end of this year.

“India is home to some of the best technology talent in the world,” said Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce. “Salesforce Hyderabad will play a crucial role in growing our technology and product teams.”

“As the enterprise cloud computing leader with more than 150,000 customers worldwide, Salesforce will strengthen the thriving local tech ecosystem,” said Jayesh Ranjan, IT secretary in the government of Telangana. Hyderabad is the capital of Telangana state.

A fat investment and a big ticket acquisition

Photo credit:Flickr.

The announcement of the new center in Hyderabad comes on the same day as Salesforce’s investment in Helpshift, an in-app customer support software provider based in Pune and San Francisco.

Last week, Salesforce announced acquisition of Demandware for a whopping US$2.8 billion. Demandware provides cloud-based services to ecommerce companies. The acquisition therefore expands Salesforce’s reach in the fast-growing ecommerce markets of Asia.

India is also a fast-growing region for cloud computing. Gartner projects the public cloud services market in India to reach US$1.26 billion this year.

The cloud computing boom is also reflected in the rapid rise of Indian SaaS (software-as-a-service) startups, which hit a funding high of US$449 million last year, three times as much as in the previous year. Fifty new SaaS startups are being founded in India each year.

India’s cloud computing tech talent pool will thus be a great resource for Salesforce Hyderabad to tap.

See: 5 top investors in Indian SaaS startups