US-based Quantum Corporation on Thursday announced the opening of its India Development Centre in Hyderabad. The company specialises in back-up storage, recovery and archiving, and secondary storage systems for data protection of companies.

The Hyderabad centre will be a software R&D facility of the company in India that works on different components of software products being designed by Quantum to integrate them with data storage and protection systems.

The company proposes to increase the manpower of the facility to 75 engineering professionals in the next 12-18 months.

Rick Belluzzo, chairman and chief executive officer, Quantum, said the company would invest about $10 million in the next couple of years in the India R&D centre besides sales and marketing infrastructure.

"We are late in coming to India because we were largely hardware focused," Belluzzo said, adding that software was now an important part of all the storage technologies.

The company also considers India as an exciting market for its products and solutions besides an R&D base. It is setting up sales and marketing offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi and ramping up its call centre facility in Pune, he said.