LinkedIn senior executive Arvind Rajan announced via Twitter today that the company has opened the Bangalore Technology Centre in India, its first research and development (R&D) facility outside North America.
Although the company refused to reveal too many details about the new office, including how much it had cost to set up, it did say that it will take care of the “basic technology infrastructure that is used to build the core products and features of LinkedIn”, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The company has already hired over 70 employees for its various sales offices and the new R&D facility in India and plans to bring in 25–30 more network engineers, software developers and database administrators to staff the Bangalore office.
LinkedIn has 135 million registered users across 200 countries, out of which 83 million are currently active. With 12 million subscribers (only a little over half of which are active), India is the second largest source of traffic for the professional social networking website, trailing the United States, which accounts for 45 million of its subscribers.
LinkedIn is not the only social network to look towards India to run its back-end operations, with Facebook having recently completed its first year of operations in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Retail giant Walmart also announced plans to open its first office outside the USA in India earlier this month and its online competitor Amazon is investing $100 million in expanding its ongoing operations in Hyderabad.
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