Accelrys to increase its Bangalore workforce

Accelrys, the software subsidiary of Pharmacopeia Inc., a company involved in developing technology for better drug discovery, will be increasing its workforce in its Bangalore R&D center. The company whose center of excellence in Bangalore has been functioning since February this year, said that it will continue to invest in its Indian operations.

“We have presently close to 50 people in the R&D center here and we will be looking to increase that to more than 100 in the next eight months time,” said Mark J Emkjer, President, Accelrys. The company has similar R&D setups in San Diego, USA and Cambridge, UK.

According to the company, the Bangalore center will be working on all its informatics products including chemical and material informatics product lines along with porting of two of its products to the Linux platform. The Accelrys product line spans the segments of bioinformatics, cheminformatics, matinformatics and modeling and simulation software. The center will also work on creating a common architecture and a unified, integrated platform for all the products.

“Traditionally most of our products have been confined to the Unix platform. The Bangalore team is currently involved in porting two of our expert modeler programs, Insight II and Catalyst, to the Linux platform.

Both products should be introduced to the market by the end of the year,” said Emkjer. Accelrys has partnered with IBM for this specific project. He added that as far as the server side was concerned, ‘the battle is already won’ by Linux but Windows will continue to rule on the desktop side for sometime in the future at least. The company is conducting a survey among its customers and will be ready to port products as and when customers evince interest on the same.

Harsha Patel, VP (India operations), Accelrys added, “As far as high end, modeling and simulation products are concerned, I think there is huge potential and opportunities for growth for Linux. It is the lower end of software, like the spreadsheet and word processing, that will continue to be dominated by Windows for sometime.”

Emkjer also said that the company would be interested in future acquisitions of companies close to the space in which it operates. According to him, Accelrys should have a list of prospective companies to go after by the end of this year. When asked about whether the list will contain any Indian companies, Emkjer refused to comment though he did not deny the possibility.

The company, which was formed in 2001 as an amalgamation of five companies, notches close to $ 100 million in revenue, with US contributing 50 percent the rest being divided among Europe and APAC. Accelrys claims to invest nearly 25 percent of its revenues in R&D efforts.

CyberMedia News Service