The Hindu Business Line : Indian IT cos grooming overseas centres on the lines at home

Chennai, Nov 4 “After India, what?” is what Indian information technology companies are thinking of as they grow their non-India software development centres. Companies have time and again reiterated that no other country can provide efficiencies of scale, cost and quality the way India can. Yet, they are grooming their second bests.

China is top priority for Infosys Technologies Ltd and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Wipro Technologies would like each of its centres to focus on niche capabilities. Most non-India development centres today have the same process capabilities as India, including certifications such as CMM, and ISO. What they lack is multiple domain skills and certain implementation aspects.

Infosys’ China centre can handle application development and maintenance, independent validation and product engineering. It only needs package implementation capabilities to be on par with its Indian Infosys centre. On domain skills, it has expertise mainly in manufacturing vertical. “We plan to grow banking domain skills soon,” said Mr S.D. Shibulal, COO, Infosys. The company has about 700 people in China and plans to add over 2,000 in the next three years. Most of the hiring would be to expand domain skills.

TCS China offers IT services, application development, maintenance and consulting (some aspects) and plans to start BPO operations soon. It is building expertise in ERP implementation, engineering services, banking and financial services, manufacturing and telecom. “We plan to have about 6,000 people in China in the next five years,” said a TCS spokesperson.

While China will be a global hub for TCS, it will also focus on domestic business. Now, 600 of the 1,100 TCS China employees work for local clients.

Infosys in China services 38 clients, of which 15 are local contributing about 25 per cent to the company’s China revenues.

The average Chinese deal size is between $500,000 and $2 million. But in recent times the company has bagged a number of large deals (worth over $2 million), Mr Shibulal said.

Wipro’s centres outside India are on par with those in India except on headcount. “They are 50-500 people strong each and we do not see this growing to match India because of lack of talent in these geographies,” said Mr Sudip Banerjee, President, Enterprise Solutions, Wipro.

Most of Wipro’s work outside India is niche.

Its Japan and China centres do language specific work, Eastern Europe centres handle BPO operations, France and Brazil centres work on embedded software design while one of its Finland centres focuses on telecom and product lifecycle management.

About 30-40 per cent of Wipro’s clientele across these centres is local (including MNCs with local operations).