The joint venture between Nokia and Siemens – Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has set up its second network management center in India. One of the world’s largest telecommunications solutions providers, the NSN has inaugurated its second network management center at Noida, to handle telecom networks across the world remotely and to keep up with arising trend for operators to outsource network management and maintenance.

According to NSN, its network management center, at Noida near Delhi, is its 3rd such Global Network Solutions Centre (GNSC) in the world; the NSN operates one such GNSC in Chennai in south India, and one in Lisbon, Portugal.

Simon Beresford Wylie, the CEO of NSN, stated that with two network management center, India is going to be the global hub of NSN to deliver integrated, multi-technology, multi-vendor platform for the NSN’s operations across the world. NSN spokeswoman stated that the new Noida center will provide redundancy for the Chennai and Lisbon centers.

Mr, Wylie stated that “the new Noida facility will complement the two existing centres in Lisbon in Portugal and Chennai”. He said, "This network of GNSCs is designed to help customers get to market faster through round-the-clock project management, ensure high network and service performance through transparent Service Level Agreements and improve service delivery efficiency while reducing risk.”

In 2007, NSN announced its US$100 million investment plan for India, and the Noida GNSC is part of the investment plan. The company last year announced that it would shift the headquarters of its global services business unit, from Munich to Noida. And now, there is a global services team of 20,000-people available at the headquarters in India.

Mr. Beresford Wylie said, "The leadership team for services has also moved to the Noida centre. Having a GNSC at the same location helps us." According to the NSN’s global head of services Rajeev Suri, the services unit contributes 40% of its revenues.

Last year, Nokia Siemens Networks launched a manufacturing plant in Chennai. According to NSN spokeswoman, the plant caters the demand from local market where over 5,000 Nokia base stations are being set up every month. NSN has more than 50 offices in India, with more than 8,000 people across 200 locations. The NSN employees are working in various departments including sales, services, research and development and marketing.

Meanwhile, Nokia Siemens Networks has announced that it is looking for a loan of 200 million euros from the European Investment Bank (EIB), and it will use the loan to finance part of its research and development for upcoming 4th generation long-term evolution (LTE) wireless telecoms technology. Last month, Nokia inked a 500-million-euro, five-year loan agreement with EIB to partly finance its software research and development projects to make its Symbian-based smartphones more competitive.