US software firm, Novell Software, which has been successfully operating in India for the last 14 years, plans to invest Rs400 crore ($100 million), to ramp up its operations in the country.  The company is looking at market expansion, infrastructure and  research and product development capabilities in a bid to capitalise in the booming Indian economy.

As part of the scale-up plan,  the company, yesterday inaugurated the India Development Centre (IDC) at Bangalore, its largest engineering facility outside the United States.  The 2-lakh sq feet facility  will accommodate 700 people and carry out operations in product development, engineering and testing in new verticals to provide solutions to its customers worldwide.

''The investment will be mainly on people, physical infrastructure and market expansion. We are not just using the talent pool available here to develop the best interoperable Linux and IT management software, but also to sell our products here,'' said Novell president and chief executive officer Ronald W Hovsepian.

Recently, Novell bagged a major contract from the Tamil Nadu government to run 40,000 desktops, about 200 servers and two mainframes on Linux.

''We see a great business opportunity in India as companies are migrating from proprietary source platforms to open source platforms. We want to cash in on our mixed-source platforms that are interoperable with the proprietary systems,'' Hovsepian said.

Novell, which earned revenues of $932 million in 2007  has projected to reach $940 - 970 million in 2008.