Socrates Software, the Indian subsidiary of Singapore-based FTD Technology, has set up a software development centre in Bangalore. This 52,000 square feet facility, built with an investment of $4.5 million, will work towards developing competency in embedded technology, which will focus on the digital consumer and personal communication products, from outsourcing partner, Toshiba Corporation.

Socrates started its Indian operations in July 2001 and is targeting project revenues of $5 million in the next financial year.

The projects at the development centre would be focused around the embedded domain and reusable software components, used for multiple applications. Besides this, the development centre would also be working around developing and porting real-time operating systems and writing code for device drivers. The company is also working on several projects relating to audio-video and speech codecs, development of middleware for Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) framework and for the DVD framework.

Currently, Socrates has around 120 engineers, which it plans to increase to 200 by the end of the next financial year. FTD Technologies, Socrates’ parent company, showed revenues of $19.7 million (Singapore dollars) during the last financial year and is targeting a revenue of S$27-28 million this financial year.

Kazutoshi Eguchi, general manager of Toshiba Corporation said that Toshiba had invested around S$5.5 million in FDI Technologies during the last financial year. Eguchi said, “Socrates Software is of utmost importance for Toshiba’s semiconductor business, which will get a fillip from Socrates’ skilled expertise.”

He also added that Socrates is the only Indian software company to which Toshiba has outsourced its work in embedded technology. Toshiba has outsourcing agreements with Indian software companies like Sasken and Wipro in areas other than embedded technology space.