McAfee to expand India team by 50

Raghuvir Badrinath Bangalore April 20, 2005

McAfee, the global major in anti-virus software solutions, has announced it plans to increase its Indian technology team by 50 per cent over the next one year.

The company currently has around 375 technology professionals accounting for 15 per cent of its global team and with the expansion, India will house close to 23 per cent of the technology workforce for McAfee.

Said Gene Hodges, president, McAfee Inc: "Its been close to three years since we set up our India engineering centre and we have grown this to around 400 technology professionals. This centre is a crucial part of our distributed development team and has also built a few of our products fully. We plan to increase the India technology team by 50 per cent over the next 12-18 months with whatever investment this expansion requires."

In addition to the engineering centre, McAfee last year had set up a anti-virus research centre called Anti Virus and Vulnerability Response Team (AVERT).

The centre co-ordinates with 11 other similar units across the globe and provides businesses with the services required to react quickly, within 60 minutes, to intrusions on desktops, servers and networks and protect computer systems from the next generation of blended attacks and threats.

"The aim is to identify virus and spam threats and to be ready with a product within 60 minutes of the identification of the threat," said Sridhar Jayanthi, VP - engineering & head of India operation, McAfee.

Commenting on the evolution of threats to the digital economy, Hodges said that nowadays there are professional systems engineers who are taking up 'jobs' spreading viruses and spams for financial gains.

"The financial industry is the main target and now it is spreading to the mobile world. In addition to these mbutt attacks there is an increasing trend in attacking a corporation's network infrastructure. We are working on solutions for all these issues and as of now 60 per cent of attacks are being pre-empted and stopped by our solutions. Going forward, we estimate that our solutions will pre-empt close to 90 per cent of the attacks," he added.

He felt that Indian software firms and the BPO companies should take adequate precautions due to the backlash in the US over outsourcing to India.

"Spam on the Voice over IP network, termed as SPIT, is emerging as a major threat factor to the BPO industry and as VoIP is being embraced by lot of organisations, it is a threat to be wary off. McAfee is researching solutions for this issue also and will be offering a decent solution in the near future," Hodges noted.