Yahoo! the global Internet communications, commerce and media company, is the latest on the block to begin outsourcing its software requirements from India by setting up a development centre in Bangalore, its first outside the United States.

Working in tandem with its only research and development centre in the US, the new facility will design and develop a slew of products for the parent company's business units, worldwide.

The parent company has about 20 subsidiaries with domain expertise in diverse fields.

The centre will focus on software development and Internet-based product innovation in multiple areas, including communications and marketing to meet the growing demand for new Internet services.

New versions of the existing product range will be developed from the wealth of data and information the portal has built over the years.

"We will have about 150 professional at the centre by the end of 2004. These will be new jobs being created to outsource our global requirements.

"For hiring the new staff, we will tap the local talent as well as those Indian professionals returning from the US," Yahoo! software development centre CEO Venkat Panchapakesan told rediff.com on Monday.

Panchapakesan, however, did not disclose the investment being made by Yahoo! in India for setting up the facility and its operational costs.

Though the wholly owned subsidiary has begun hiring software engineers for the new facility, the number of employees has not been made official. But it is expected to ramp up the figure to about 100 by this year-end.

According to IT industry sources, the company will be incurring an average of Rs 500,000 per employee annually, including the cost of infrastructure, operational expenses and wages.

"Focusing on delivering business critical software and services to its operations in the US and its global subsidiaries, the centre will develop scalable server technology, UNIX/C++, middleware, TCP/IP networking, Oracle/MySQL, Apache and data mining algorithms," Panchapakesan stated.

The centre will also provide customisation and technical support for the launch of Yahoo! products globally. Development of Yahoo! Ad Systems, messaging products and Yahoo! financial services are on anvil.

The company's officials have claimed to have about 50 million users in the US alone. The number of users in India was not disclosed.

As one of the first online navigational guides to the Web, Yahoo! caters to over 235 users in 25 countries in 13 languages.