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Abhrajit Gangopadhyay

BANGALORE, May 23

INFOSYS Technologies Ltd's efforts with telecom equipment giant Cisco Systems is on the upswing with current manpower engagement swelling up to close to 350 from 150 in January this year, company sources said.

Traction from Lucent Technologies are also on the rise, they added. While most of the work shipped here are in the nature of ''feature testing'', project testing is also coming in, the sources said.

Close to 200 engineers are estimated to be in the Lucent projects and there are ''some imminent traction'' from the client on a bigger scale, they added. Meanwhile, Lucent's engagement with another domestic giant - Wipro Technologies has gradually shrunk in the last three quarters as the troubled telecom equipment manufacturer struggled to sell boxes in the slowing U.S. economy.

Most of the telecom box makers such as Nortel Networks had sharply cut down their outsourcing efforts with Indian vendors following the US down turn. This in turn jolted domestic vendors' growth in the last fiscal.

''Things seem to be looking up in the communications space,'' an analyst with a top European brokerage noted. It can be recalled that post 9/11, testing projects have surged to the Indian software developers.

''However, most of them are old feature testing and very few are of the latest features or products,'' noted the analyst with the European brokerage.

Many of the domestic vendors, who witnessed sharp cut in work-flow from equipment manufacturers, shifted to telecom service providers to propel their growth.

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