Mumbai, India — In a move designed as part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, Facebook Inc., owner of the largest social networking hub, plans to open its first operations office in the Indian city of Hyderabad to support its growing global operations.
Facebook, the largest social-networking hub is once again spreading-out its wings, and this time, it is not just adding any new users or features, it is opening up more offices beyond the boundaries of the US. Don Faul , director of global online operations at Facebook, arrived in India on Tuesday and he is already scrutinizing CVs for the post of the company’s India head. The world’s largest online social network is also planning to hire local language specialists, IT security heads, and online sales managers for its India office, to be set up at Hyderabad.
The office, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, which will primarily focus on providing tech support for the site’s 400 million users and counting, will also have advertising and developer support teams, the company said Monday. It will supplement Facebook’s other centers in Palo Alto, California; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas.
“Having multiple support centers in a multiple time zones provides Facebook users and advertisers around the world with round-the-clock, multilingual support,” the Palo Alto, California-based company said in an e-mailed statement today.
“As more and more people share and connect on Facebook, we are growing our operations and teams to support them around the world. Just last week, we announced plans to invest in a new Austin, Texas, office, and today in India we unveiled our intentions to open an office in Hyderabad,” Faul, wrote.
“Both of these offices will enable us to better serve the more than 400 million of you now using Facebook worldwide, as well as our growing number of advertisers and developers. We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we are forming in these new locations,” he added.
The number of Facebook users have propelled to more than 400 million since it was founded in 2004. “Seventy percent of the people using Facebook are outside the U.S. and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages,” said Faul, adding that the social networking site has more than 8 million active members in India alone, who use Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family based both in the country and overseas.
The new center will “tap into the region’s strong pool of talented people who understand operations and technology, and help us more effectively serve the needs of our users, advertisers and developers,” Faul, said in the statement. That center will eventually house about 200 sales and operations workers. Facebook, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., was lured to the area by $200,000 in economic development incentives from local authorities.
The India office will provide language support globally as well as locally. As of now, more than 70 translations are available on the website, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. We plan to increase our coverage to more Indian languages.
According to its Web site, Facebook is hiring in the U.S., Italy, Spain, Australia, Ireland, England, France, Japan, Germany, Sweden and Canada, as well as India.
Facebook joins global companies including Microsoft and Google Inc. that have centers in Hyderabad, southern India. The company did not release details of the size of investment or how many people if will hire for the India office.