India is not just home base for the largest number of outsourcing companies and high-tech workers assembled in a single country to accommodate America's thirst to move IT offshore, it has also become a huge market for IT unto itself.

Economists project that India will become one of the largest economies in the world by 2050. Its growth rate last year was put at 19 percent.

IBM, which already has more than 50,000 employees in India and an investment of $6 billion, announced that it will expand its operations even further with the creation of an Autonomic Computing Technology Center in Bangalore, India.

Autonomic computing is IBM's term for self-managing and self-healing systems.

For example, IBM designed database servers that can self-tune without human intervention, and it embedded autonomic capabilities in Lotus software that automate administrative tasks, such as automatically detaching text and moving it to storage, according to Catherine Pleil, program director for IBMs Customer and Partner Programs.

According to IDC, IT management is big business with IT labor spending pegged at $416 billion in 2005 and expected to reach almost half a trillion dollars by 2008. The goal of autonomic computing as IBM sees it is to add intelligence to the network and devices in order to free up IT personnel for more complex tasks.

Pleil added that IBM is building the Autonomic Center in Bangalore in recognition of the fact that Asia is one of the fastest growing markets in the world.