Barely six months after social networking site Facebook announced its plans to make Hyderabad its home in Asia,it officially logged into the city with its global operations center at Hi-Tech City.
The Hyderabad centre,which is its second international centre outside US apart from Dublin,will house Facebooks online advertising and developer support teams that will provide round-the-clock,multi-lingual support to the social networking sites worldwide online user,advertisers and developer base.
While to begin with the company has kicked off operations with nearly 50 people,plans were afoot to increase this headcount to 100 by March 2011 and up it to 1,000-1500 people over next two to three years,sources told TOI.Sources said that while the company had started off with a smaller space in the city,the gameplan was to later move into bigger premises coming up next door.
Company officials were,however,tightlipped over their overall investment and hiring plans for India.But they pointed out that India was among the fastest growing markets for Facebook and a key part of their global operations.
Facebooks active userbase in India has shot up to over 15 million from around 8 million six months ago while its global active userbase grew only from 400 million to 500 million.
Facebooks director of online operations Don Faul said Hyderabad beat competition from 20 other global locations in Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific to emerge as Facebooks face in Asia largely because of availability of superior talent,supportive and proactive state government,easy access due to good infrastructure,the time-zone advantage to support a 24×7 coverage,among others.
At the helm of the Facebook India team is Kirthiga Reddy,a former senior hand at Motorola,as director of online operations and India operations head as well as ex-Googler Manoj Varghese,who will be steering the companys user operations as director
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