Intuit to hire 300 at new development center in India

Intuit announced Tuesday that it plans to hire 300 staff over the next five years at its new product development center in Bangalore, India. The company currently employs about 17 staff at the center.

The engineers at the center are expected to come out with ideas for new products, Scott Cook, the company’s co-founder and chairman of the executive committee told reporters Tuesday in Bangalore.

Intuit of Mountain View, California, is a vendor of small-business accounting and personal-finance software.

The center is creating a test-automation suite for Intuit’s QuickBooks line of software for small and medium-size businesses, and for the integration of QuickBooks with applications from other vendors, Cook said.

In addition, Intuit is outsourcing product development to the Chennai and Bangalore operations of Cognizant Technology Solutions, an offshore outsourcing company based in Teaneck, New Jersey.

About 114 engineers at Cognizant have been developing Intuit’s QuickBooks Customer Manager, according to Cook, who added that the engineers at Cognizant have responsibility for interacting with customers, developing the specifications, and designing and building the product. Cognizant is also working on a financial-statements designer.

The 14-month old outsourcing arrangement with Cognizant is the first time Intuit has outsourced product development, Cook said. The number of staff at Cognizant working for Intuit will grow depending on the number of projects that come up, he added.

Intuit is in India to take advantage of the quality engineering talent available in the country, Cook said. With the arrangement with Cognizant, and the new center in Bangalore, Intuit is now able to attack faster new opportunities, which it could not have done from the U.S. alone, he said. The move to India will not however lead to moving of jobs from the U.S., he added.

A number of multinational software companies including Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP have large product development operations in India. Intuit is a relatively late entrant into India.