Invensys, a UK-based global industrial automation, controls and transportation group, will invest $20 million (around Rs 86 crore) to ramp up manpower at its Invensys Development Centre in Hyderabad during the current financial year.

"As part of our long-term commitment to India, we will make an incremental investment of around $20 million in adding 200 software development, quality assurance and domain engineers to the existing 330 at our Hyderabad centre during the 2008 fiscal," Steve Young, senior vice-president, (IPS global development), Invensys, said on Wednesday.  

The move is to take the IDC to the next level of maturity by turning it into a centre with end-to-end development capabilities, he said, adding that the IDC was leveraging the co-location of the several product development groups to build portfolio integration centres of excellence for all stages of the software development lifecycle.

The 50,000-sft centre was set up in April 2002 at the Vanenburg IT park in Hyderabad with an objective to retain the intellectual property within the company and to augment the current development and support groups in the US. The company had invested $35 million in this centre over the last five years.

Stating that the company had entered into a $30-million contract with Reliance Industries for supplying process automation and control systems for its 100-acre Jamnagar export refinery project around three years back, Young said that the company would leverage this success into opportunities in other major oil and gas companies in the country.

"We would aggressively pursue the vast opportunities that oil and gas and pharmaceutical sectors offer," he added.