Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's largest software services exporter, has tied up with Cisco

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Systems to build a data centre at its Chennai campus. The partnership will build or evolve next generation data centres.

"We have been working with Cisco for quite sometime now. We already do work for Cisco, which is worth more than $100 million. Both TCS and Cisco are committing investments to this facility, and the market opportunities are in multi-million dollar levels," said S Ramadorai, chief executive office of TCS in a press conference held in Mumbai. Ramadorai, however did not quantify the investments in the venture.

"We already have around 500 people working on the Cisco account, we will be doubling the number," said N Chandrasekharan, chief operating officer, TCS.

The TCS and Cisco strategic alliance will initially focus on India as well as mutual enterprise customers in the US and the UK in the key verticals of banking and finance services, telecom and government, as well as small and medium-sized business.

"This strategic alliance will take advantage of Cisco's industry-leading data centre networking solutions and TCS' global network delivery model to help our customers increase the efficiency and agility of their IT (information technology) operations," added Chandrasekharan.

"We said that we would be investing around $1.2 billion in India. We have fully invested that amount. We have increased the head count in Cisco from 1,800 to 5,000 people," said Wim Elfrink, chief globalisation officer and executive vice-president, Cisco Services.

The facility will be called Cisco Technology Lab, which will allow TCS to develop network-based data centre solutions, test frameworks, develop skills and certify employees in Cisco data centre technologies. The lab will also allow Cisco and TCS to illustrate proof-of-concepts and IT and networking methodologies for client-specific business processes.