The Chennai Skyline. Photo by VtTN, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

[Via Satellite 06-30-2016] ViaSat has opened its first Research and Development (R&D) center in Chennai, India. The center, spanning more than 30,000 square feet to accommodate nearly 125 engineers, is part of the company’s ongoing globalization strategy.

ViaSat anticipates the Chennai R&D center will enable the company to reach more customers for internet connectivity, including potentially using the future Terabit per second ViaSat 3 network, of which the third satellite is planned for the Asia-Pacific market. The news comes as India pursues the government’s “Digital India” and “Smart Cities” programs. By 2019, ViaSat expects to have more than 250 engineers in Chennai working on next-generation technologies.

“India is a recognized technology innovation hub with highly-sought after engineering talent and business potential,” said Mark Dankberg, ViaSat chairman and CEO. “The new center in Chennai is a major step in building ViaSat’s footprint in Asia, making India important to our strategic globalization efforts, R&D acceleration initiatives and our ability to bring comprehensive, next-generation cloud, virtualization, networking and sophisticated network management applications to market.”