Expanding its India operations, Oracle Software is planning to almost double its Indian head count to 4000 over a couple of years, a senior company official said.

"We will double current strength of 2460 over a couple of years which would serve newer areas like shared services, back-end operations, and call centre initiatives", Derek Williams, executive vice president, Asia Pacific, Oracle Software, told reporters in New Delhi on the sidelines of the launching of a e-governance initiatives.

The company is also planning a new development centre in Hyderabad for which it has bought land there recently.

"We have bought land in Hyderabad recently to set up a development centre there which would be an expanded campus of our existing facilities there," Shekhar Dasgupta, managing director, Oracle India said.

Williams, however, declined to give any investment figures.

He said the new centre would be triple the size of Bangalore centre in terms of area and the new centre would be engaged in Oracle e-business solutions.

Oracle, which has set up its largest development centre in India outside United States, has currently two centres in India-- Bangalore, which looks after the data base software and the Hyderabad centre can take care of e-business software.

"In the last quarter we recruited 1000 employees," Dasgupta said. The construction of the Hyderabad centre would start in the next four months after necessary government approvals come in, Dasgupta said.

He said the company would step up investments in intangible areas like R&D, training and knowledge centres.

The company, which is actively working on becoming a complete solutions provider, is already working with four states in the e-governance sector and are in talks with 13 more states to begin the programme.

As part of its e-governance initiatives, the company along with Hewlett Packard India has announced that they would jointly set up a e-governance Centre of Excellence in Gurgaon to support and provide a platform for e-governance applications in India.

The centre, which will be located at Oracle's office premises in Gurgaon will be up and and running from April 21, 2003.