Amazon Moves More Development to India

Amazon.com Inc. will open a second development center in India, to be located in the southern Indian city of Chennai, it announced Friday.

The center will focus on developing new features for Amazon.com’s sites worldwide that will help customers find and discover anything they want to buy online, the company said.

The company set up its first development center in India last year, in Bangalore. That center is focused on search technology and web services, Drew Herdener, a company spokesman said Friday.

Amazon.com, of Seattle, did not disclose the number of staff it would be hiring for its Chennai development center. “All I can say is that there are dozens of positions available in Chennai,” Herdener said.

The development center in Chennai is the company’s fourth software development center outside the U.S. Amazon.com has centers in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Cape Town, South Africa, besides the two centers in India. Its primary development center in the U.S. is in Seattle, Herdener said.

Amazon.com decided to set up a new center in Chennai, in addition to the one in Bangalore, to get access to the talent in the city, Herdener said.

The company also has a customer support center in Hyderabad.

The Amazon Development Center in Chennai will manage all technology aspects of the Web site features developed at this location, the company said. This ownership includes idea generation, analysis and technical design, as well as front, middle and back-tier software development across a variety of architectures and technologies, it added.

By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service