AT&T's Sterling Adds Software Developers In India

AT&T Inc. subsidiary Sterling Commerce plans to increase the number of employees in India this year, a company executive told TechWeb.

Sterling Commerce, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company offerings "multi-enterprise collaboration" that enables businesses to electronically transmit and share data across many enterprises, will add several hundred software developers in 2006, giving it nearly 500 by the end of 2006.

Today, developers at the company's India division are working on purchasing, order management, supply chain visibility and synchronization software, as well as packaged composite applications.

Sterling Commerce, then parent SBC Communications Inc., entered Bangalore supported by 80 employees in late 2004 with the $170 million acquisition of Yantra Corp., which provided order management and supply chain fulfillment software.

Since the Yantra acquisition closed in January 2005, Sterling Commerce has added nearly 300 software developers in India, and will hire another 200 this year, said Sam Starr, the company's president and chief executive officer.IBM Corp. officials recently said the company would raise its employee headcount 40 percent in India to 55,000 during the next year.

U.S. security software maker McAfee Inc. plans to invest $80 million in India and hire 400 people by 2008. Dell Inc. noted it may add 10,000 workers in India during the next three years, nearly doubling its headcount.

But Starr said not to let cheap labor wages entice the move. "It's not that simple," he acknowledges. "You then have to consider the project and overhead to ensure the quality of the project because of the extra communications required to work in a distributed environment."

The "mix" of U.S. and Indian developers gives companies "the best of all worlds."

U.S. tech firms continue to hire developers in India, where wages average roughly $25,000 annually, compared with $75,000 in the United States, Starr said. He talks about India, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) and open source in this podcast.0