Apple to launch mapping centre in Hyderabad, its first facility in India

Tim Cook, CEO of the iPhone-maker Apple, is slated to be in Hyderabad on Thursday, May 19, and the company is to inaugurate its mapping centre, its first facility in India. It will be launched at a closed door event between 11 am and noon along with Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao.

The leased facility is to be located at Tishman Speyer's Waverock  facility that provides an IT/ITES Special Economic Zone campus, adjacent to the financial district at Nanakramguda in Hyderabad and not far from the campuses of the Indian School of Business,  Microsoft, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini and some other leading IT and financial services companies.

This was shared with Business Today by a senior government official. It is to begin operations with a few hundred people but when fully operational, could house a total of 2,500 people. Apparently, Apple will have about 100-odd of its own employees and the others - mostly editors working on GIS tools and maps - outsourced from a third party.

Those within the government say the company has not yet shared the exact investment it intends to make. But then, it is argued that this need not be huge, at least initially, as the expectation is that these days everything could be on the cloud with the servers in the US and the core development team here.

Some within the industry say it could make sense for companies to have servers in the US as maps could be a tricky business given that it also has a lot of intellectual property riding on it and therefore companies may prefer to have it created on their servers.