If it happens, Bell Labs will be the second major organisation after Microsoft to set up a software-development centre in the city.

According to sources, Bell Labs is planning to locate its software- development centre in the Indian Institute of Information Technology park, a high-tech city for infotech being planned by the Andhra Pradesh government in Hyderabad. Sources also said that a team of Bell Labs officials had recently visited the city and are expected to take a decision shortly.

The Hyderabad software development centre will be Bell Labs' first development centre in the country and the fifth in Asia after Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan.

It has development centres in 22 countries around the world including the United States, Germany, England, Norway, Ireland, Mexico and France and employsabout 25,000 researchers.

The Andhra Pradesh government has been aggressively promoting Hyderabad as an alternative to Bangalore to software developers. In fact, it has been quite successful in wooing the software community with big names like Microsoft preferring Hyderabad to Bangalore. Bell Labs, which was formerly the systems and technology part of AT&T, became a part of Lucent Technologies after the trivesture of AT&T in the year 1996.

Headquartered out of New Jersy in the US, Bell Labs is one of the world's most renowned research and devlopment organisations in infotech and telecom and has an impressive track record of receiving one patent a day on average since its inception in 1925.

It has patented more than 26,000 products and technologies till now. Bell labs employs five Nobel Laureates.

The company's various innovations include products and technologies like the transistor, laser, solar cell, digital- switching technology, communication satellite, cellular mobile radio, stereo recording andUnix, one of the most popular operating system software.

Among Bell Laboratories' key areas of concentration are microelectronics, photonics and software. These are handled out of its three divisions computing and mathematical sciences, physical sciences and communications sciences.

The Andhra Pradesh government under the leadership of its computer-savvy chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu has been actively wooing software organisations from around the world to set up base in Hyderabad.

Its efforts proved successful when about a month ago Microsoft decided to set up a software development centre in the city. Apart from aggressively courting companies, the state administration is also concentrating on creating adequate infrastructure to support the industry.

The government recently created a new company, Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Services Ltd (APITSL), to provide the necessary IT infrastructure in the state. Andhra Pradesh Information Technology Services Ltd will interconnect the variousdistrict headquarters and cities with 2 mega bits per second (Mbps) optic-fibre lines and also computerise the various government departments.