Kevin Rollins, Dell's president and chief executive officer, said the company's global product group, a global development unit, sales and service operations, and call centres in India employ 8,000 people today.

"By the end of this year our team should be 10,000 strong and it has been growing consistently," Rollins told reporters in the high-tech city of Bangalore, where most of the compnay's operations are based.

"The talent base and capability here is second to none," he said.

Bangalore, home to more than 1,500 technology firms, exports more than one-third of India's software. India, where engineers work for one-seventh the salary of their US counterparts, has the second largest pool of English-speaking graduates in the world.

Rollins said Dell had revised its revenue target from 60 billion dollars to 80 billion dollars to be achieved in the next three to four years.

"It is turning Dell from a personal computer-maker into a broad-based information technology supply company handling customers, consumers, global corporations and offering opportunities for a country like India," he said.

"We are a global company and we seek the best talent in every region. India has been a wonderful source of that. We will move into more cities in the future," he said.

Dell recently opened a call centre in the northern city of Chandigarh and has a similar facility in southern Hyderabad.

However last year it moved one of its call centres based in Bangalore out of India due to the poor quality of its English-speaking employees.

Rollins defended the move and attributed it to the company's failure to manage a rapidly growing business in India.

"We were growing too much, too fast, in too many places. Now we have slowed down and prioritised our growth. It was a misunderstanding," he said.

According to the National Association of Software and Service Companies, India's five year-old outsourcing industry is set to grow by 40 percent and hit revenues of 5.1 billion dollars this year.

It predicts that the movement of jobs from western countries to India could hit 1.2 million by 2008 and bring in revenues of between 21 billion to 24 billion dollars.

Rollins said Dell will not evolve into a full-fledged IT services company.

"Our strategy is to stay close to our hardware and add to that menu over time. We know our hardware well and then provide outsourcing around it with a small 'o'," he said.

Rollins said the fastest growing segement for the company was servers, printing and imaging, and flat panel products.

"Fifty percent of the company's revenues now come from outside the United States mainly from Asia, Japan and Europe," he said.

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