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Vishwanath Kulkarni

More hirings as more projects are shifted to India

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Bangalore Jan. 21 Closing the gap with top tier Indian IT vendors in terms of record employee additions, the `Big Blue' IBM, has become the first IT multinational to cross 50,000 mark as of end December 2006.

IBM's India headcount stood at 53,000 as on December 31, 2006. IBM added 14,500 employees in calendar 2006 as it shifted more projects to India to leverage offshore delivery capabilities, registering a 38-per cent rise in headcount over the past year.

Currently, IBM's employee intake is almost on par with that of top three Indian IT firms, which collectively added 60,000 people to their rolls in 2006. TCS added over 24,116 employees, while Infosys and Wipro hired 20,000 and 15,152 people each in the past 12 months.

India accounted for a majority of the 20,000 employees that IBM added to its delivery centres in low-cost countries in 2006.

"In support of our clients, we expanded our global delivery centres, which is a more efficient model for services delivery. In 2006 we added capabilities to our centres in India, Brazil and Argentina, to provide the ability to seamlessly transfer workload," IBM said in a SEC filing post Q4 results.

With 53,000 employees in 27 locations, India is the home to the largest base of IBMers outside the US accounting for about one sixth of Big Blue's workforce. IBM, like the Indian vendors, kept its hiring engines on through 2006 to add a little over 1,000 employees a month.

The BPO-outfit IBM Daksh Business Process Services Pvt Ltd accounted for over 40 per cent of the IBM's India workforce. The BPO subsidiary has grown to over 20,000 people from 6,000 in 2004, when IBM acquired Daksh eServices Pvt Ltd.

Through its aggressive ramp-up, IBM leads the pack of other IT multinationals like Accenture, EDS, Hewlett Packard and Cap Gemini among others, in expanding workforce to leverage the offshore advantage that India offered.

Emerging markets

Meanwhile, India along with Russia continued to top the growth rates for IBM in the emerging markets in 2006. While India and Russia both posted growth of over 30 per cent, China grew 18 per cent and Brazil grew by nine per cent.

The BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries contributed $4.5 billion of revenue, up 16 per cent year-to-year without the divested PC business in last year's results.

When compared to previous two years, the growth in 2006 seemed to have slowed down for IBM in India where it had clocked growth rates of 55 per cent and 45 per cent in 2005 and 2004 respectively. However, IBM India officials maintained that growth in 2006 was on a larger revenue base, without disclosing details.

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