HCLTech and IBM announced a new collaboration to establish a Generative AI Center of Excellence (GenAI CoE) based on the IBM watsonx AI and data platform.

Together with IBM, HCLTech aims to train 10,000 of its engineers and architects in IBM’s innovative AI technologies, specifically watsonx. The adaptive portfolio, CloudSMART for IBM, assists businesses in continuous innovation through advanced technologies, utilizing the latest business and technology insights.

The CoE, which will be available through HCLTech’s AI and Cloud Native Labs in Noida, London and New Jersey and Santa Clara in the US, will help enterprises modernize legacy applications, develop IT service management (ITSM) use cases, reduce coding complexity, improve skill development on the IBM watsonx platform and enable continuous innovation.

“This expansion of our work with IBM will facilitate rapid exploration of AI’s potential as we create highly differentiated HCLTech offerings using the latest IBM technology. We plan to embed watsonx in HCLTech AI Force with GenAI-powered solutions to support code modernization,” said Alan Flower, EVP, Global Head, AI & Cloud Native Labs, HCLTech. “Additionally, we plan to help our clients accelerate GenAI adoption through AI facilitated by watsonx while enhancing digital skills for enterprise productivity through the implementation of watsonx Orchestrate.”

“Driving adoption of responsible generative AI solutions is an important component of our collaboration with service partners like HCLTech. Through this Center of Excellence, we plan to empower our joint clients to rapidly explore, experiment and engineer generative AI solutions with watsonx that are designed to meet their current business challenges,” said Stephen Smith, General Manager, Service Partners, IBM Ecosystem.

The CoE will offer clients access to education and training resources covering diverse AI technologies, including watsonx.ai, watsonx.data, watsonx.governance, watsonx Code Assistants, watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx Assistant to help skill their resources and provide a platform for building use cases.

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The Indian government is set to partner with leading Information Technology (IT) firms like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), HCLTech and Tech Mahindra in a INR 6,000 crore initiative aimed at developing software for quantum technologies according to a recent report. 

This scheme, designed to support Indian startups and scientists in the emerging quantum tech field, signifies a significant step towards harnessing quantum computing capabilities.

Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder of HCL and chairman of the mission governing board of the National Quantum Mission, revealed that the government plans to engage major IT companies in researching quantum technologies due to the extensive algorithmic requirements in this domain.

“We are going to involve our software companies like TCS, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc., in this effort. We want them to conduct research on quantum technologies because there is a huge amount of algorithms required for quantum,” he said, according to the report.

The mission is laying groundwork to establish four separate hubs focusing on quantum hardware, quantum encryption, sensors, and materials by August. These hubs, to be located in esteemed research institutions such as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), will operate as non-profit Section 8 companies, empowering their leaders to make strategic decisions.

Chowdhry emphasised the mission’s objective to involve startups in quantum tech, with approximately 50 startups already active in the sector. These startups will receive mentoring and initial seed funding through the thematic hubs, fostering innovation and growth in quantum computing.

“A bank or an electrical grid in India can be attacked by an adequate quantum computer sitting in China. We must start working on making our country quantum secure. We are going to work with different agencies in the government to make them aware that something like this has to be done, or the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) should start to work on creating a policy for making all banks,” said Chowdhry.

“We will create our own quantum computers. For the period we don’t have a quantum computer, we’ll buy a few quantum computers to do research on. But we are not going to use quantum computers only on the cloud, because it’s very expensive,” he added.

Quantum computing, leveraging quantum physics principles, offers unparalleled computational capabilities compared to traditional computing. A quantum computer’s ability to represent multiple values simultaneously enables rapid solution of complex problems that would be impractical for conventional computers.

Global tech giants like Google, IBM, and Intel have heavily invested in quantum computing, with China leading significant funding efforts. 

The mission’s long-term goals include developing intermediate-scale quantum computers, secure quantum communications, quantum materials, and quantum devices to advance various sectors, including banking, communications, and navigation.

Chowdhry highlighted the urgency of making India quantum secure to mitigate potential cyber threats, advocating for strategic collaborations and policy development in quantum technology adoption. The mission’s comprehensive agenda encompasses a range of quantum technologies, aiming to position India at the forefront of quantum computing and applications.

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HCLTech has announced a collaboration with Arm, a leading technology provider of processor IP, to augment custom silicon chips that support AI-driven business operations.

The partnership will bring to market solutions that enable semiconductor manufacturers, system OEMs and cloud service providers to enhance the computing efficiency of their data centre environments and meet evolving customer demands.

HCLTech will leverage pre-integrated Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystems (CSS) to help clients minimise development risks and swiftly deliver innovative, market-customised solutions geared toward improved performance and scalability for AI workloads.

HCLTech has preferential access to Neoverse CSS as a member of Arm Total Design, an ecosystem that brings together industry leaders to accelerate frictionless delivery of Arm-based custom silicon chips.

This access empowers HCLTech to stay at the forefront of cutting-edge technologies designed to efficiently manage AI workloads, including meeting the future demands of data centre environments.

“HCLTech’s collaboration with Arm will contribute to the development of industry-leading custom AI silicon solutions that will revolutionise the way AI workloads are addressed in data centre environments. Together, we look forward to spearheading technology advancement and innovation in the semiconductor industry,” said HCLTech Engineering and R&D Services executive vice president Ameer Saithu.

“Through Arm Total Design, our partners can leverage the expertise and support of other industry leaders to bring custom silicon solutions to market faster. HCLTech is a welcome addition to the ecosystem, and we are excited to see how they leverage their custom AI silicon capabilities and Arm Neoverse CSS to innovate next-generation solutions,” said Arm India president Guru Ganesan.

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HCLTech announced a global strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enterprises explore and develop GenAI-led use cases, proofs of concept (PoC), tools and solutions.

They will develop a structural framework with target-based milestones aligned to business strategy that enables the co-creation of customized Gen AI-led solutions and offers clients flexible consumption models. 

The companies will work together to implement AWS GenAI services such as Amazon  Bedrock, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Titan for enterprises across multiple industries, adding momentum to their digital transformation journeys.

Leveraging HCLTech’s full technology stack, core engineering capabilities and AI experience,  this alliance will allow clients to see the impact of their GenAI investment and gain early access to AWS’s advanced GenAI services. 

“This strategic collaboration agreement seeks to help enterprises unlock the value of GenAI by empowering them to reshape business models, elevate customer experiences and foster growth. A premier partner with a diverse range of AWS competencies, we are committed to accelerating the widespread adoption of AI to our global client base,” Prabhakar Appana, senior vice president and AWS Global Head, HCLTech said.

HCLTech recently earned the AWS Generative AI Competency Partner status for complementing AWS’s advanced GenAI portfolio with its own innovative GenAI solutions spanning various industries and enterprise functions.  

HCLTech offers a unique set of end-to-end AI capabilities, from chip development to business process optimization. Leveraging strategic partnerships with AWS and many others,  HCLTech is paving the way for the adoption of generative AI across industries. 

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HCLSoftware announced that it has been selected by the State Bank of India (SBI) for its MarTech solution as part of SBI’s digital transformation programme.

As part of the five-year agreement, HCLSoftware will deploy the HCL Unica platform to enable SBI to digitally transform its customer interaction framework and provide hyper-personalized communication across the bank’s diverse digital marketing channels, while adhering to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) and other stringent security requirements.

HCL Unica, with its advanced Customer Data Platform, AI capabilities and comprehensive campaign management tools, would leverage real-time data to significantly improve SBI’s ability to engage with its customers. It will help facilitate complex, multi-channel digital marketing campaigns, enhancing customer engagement precision and relevance.

“The partnership underscores the strength of the innovative capabilities of HCL Software to deliver digital transformation at scale. We are proud that HCL Unica would enable one of the largest banking transformations in the world and help SBI deliver superior customer engagement and experience,” said Rajiv Shesh, Chief Revenue Officer, HCLSoftware.

HCL Unica’s powerful Customer Data Platform will organize and aggregate SBI’s customer data from various touchpoints, creating a unified view that facilitates deeper insights and targeted marketing initiatives.

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HCLTech announced an expanded alliance with Google Cloud to create industry solutions and drive business value with Gemini, its multimodal large language AI model.

HCLTech will enable 25,000 engineers on Google Cloud’s latest GenAI technology to better support clients at every stage of their AI projects, including the development of new use cases and capabilities for HCLTech platforms and product offerings, and initially focusing on bringing gen AI capabilities to clients in manufacturing, healthcare, and telecom.

The IT giant recently launched HCLTech AI Force, a pre-built GenAI platform that optimizes engineering lifecycle processes from planning through development, testing and maintenance. 

HCLTech will now enhance the HCLTech AI Force platform with Gemini’s advanced code completion and summarisation capabilities, which will allow engineers to generate code, remediate issues and accelerate the delivery time and quality of software projects for clients.

It will also use Gemini models to strengthen and expand the portfolio of industry solutions built out of its dedicated Cloud Native Labs and AI Labs, which focus on accelerating client innovation and are staffed by leading AI experts and engineers. Both labs will enable clients to better scope, manage and refine gen AI projects on Google Cloud’s infrastructure.

“HCLTech and Google Cloud have a long-standing strategic partnership. This collaboration will bring to market HCLTech’s innovative GenAI solutions using Google’s most capable and scalable Gemini models. We believe this helps us to bring even more value to global enterprises through HCLTech’s differentiated portfolio,” said C Vijayakumar, CEO and managing director, HCLTech.

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HCLTech, a leading global technology company, and Computer Aided Software Technologies, Inc. (CAST), a semiconductor intellectual property (IP) cores provider, announced plans to scale their partnership to offer customised chips to enable original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) across industries accelerate their digital transformation and automation journeys.

HCLTech will enhance design verification, emulation and rapid prototyping of its turnkey system-on-chip (SoC) solutions by leveraging silicon-proven IP cores and controllers from CAST.

This will help OEMs in varied industries including automotive, consumer electronics and logistics, to significantly reduce engineering risk and development costs.

“CAST shares our vision for innovative, industry-leading electronic systems design. Their high-quality and well-supported IP cores, coupled with HCLTech’s system integration design expertise, will enable us to deliver superior custom chips to our customers worldwide,” said Vijay Guntur, President, Engineering and R&D Services, HCLTech.

“Like CAST, HCLTech has a decades-long heritage of delivering superior semiconductor SoC solutions to their customers and partners. We look forward to working together with HCLTech and enhancing the reliability, efficiency and user-friendly nature of semiconductor SoCs,” said Nikos Zervas, CEO at CAST.

CAST is a silicon IP provider founded in 1993. CAST’s ASIC and FPGA IP product line includes microcontrollers and processors; compression engines for data, images, and video; interfaces for automotive, aerospace, and other applications; various common peripheral devices; and comprehensive SoC security modules.

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HCLTech and Intel Foundry have announced their decision to expand their collaboration to co-develop silicon solutions to improve semiconductor innovation globally. This partnership will leverage HCLTech’s design expertise and Intel Foundry’s advanced technology and manufacturing capabilities. 

The goal is to establish a resilient and diversified supply chain to meet the rising global demand for semiconductor manufacturing. This collaboration will offer semiconductor manufacturers, system OEMs, and cloud services providers a robust ecosystem for semiconductor sourcing. Additionally, the collaboration has the potential to spur innovation by enabling the design of customised silicon solutions tailored to specific use cases.

“Intel Foundry’s advanced technologies and silicon-verified IPs in manufacturing and advanced packaging strengthens our delivery of innovative, accessible and diverse solutions to our mutual clients. This will also give them greater choice and flexibility in semiconductor sourcing,” said Vijay Guntur, President, Engineering and R&D Services, HCLTech.D

HCLTech has been collaborating with Intel for over 30 years, a relationship that has evolved through shared offerings and joint investments in various sectors, including silicon services, hardware engineering, telecom services, and more. The current focus is on jointly designing highly customised silicon solutions for companies, combining HCLTech’s design expertise with Intel’s manufacturing capabilities.

This expanded collaboration is set to further strengthen their partnership by fostering a strong and open ecosystem beneficial for clients requiring advanced silicon solutions.

Intel also announced that it has signed Microsoft as a foundry customer for a custom chip. This deal is part of Intel’s plan to overtake TSMC using its Intel 18A and upcoming 14A manufacturing technologies. The 18A, a 1.8nm technology, is set for early 2025 and will be used for future CPUs in both consumer and data centre markets. The 14A, planned for late 2026, will introduce a more advanced lithography tool for smaller and more efficient chips. 

Together with its collaboration with HCLTech to develop customised silicon solutions, Intel aims to meet the growing demand for semiconductors. 

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Generative AI gained ground in Indian IT in 2023. The year saw a slew of companies introducing the technology through language models of all sizes. While the rest rushed to jump on the bandwagon, some companies are taking their time to add the technology to their products and services. One of them is HCLSoftware, which believes that the use of generative AI should be pragmatic. 

The software production arm of the IT veteran HCLTech is primarily balancing the technology with the cost that customers need to pay with the value that appears. “We don’t want Gen AI just to put it in front of the customer. We want them to benefit from the technology by using the products,” declared Kalyan Kumar, HCLSoftware’s Chief Product Officer, in an interview with AIM. 

The executive was joined by the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, Rajiv Shesh, who said, “We balance it [generative AI] with the cost that the customers need to pay, and the value will appear.” 

“We are engaging with language models in several ways across our technology, and we’ve been working with these models for much longer than the emergence of the current discussion of the state. Every product line has an embedded AI capability,” Shesh elaborated. 

A prime example is HCL Unica, a software for multichannel marketing. In 2019, HCL acquired Unica, a platform developed by Yuchun Lee in 1992 that provides AI-driven assistance today. 

“We founded Unica focused on marketing to help organisations provide offerings so targeted that it doesn’t feel like selling or marketing but a service to the customer,” said Lee, who also joined the interview alongside Shesh and Kumar.

He further elaborated that a high level of computation is required to handle this concept. “I think going forward, this is really about how HCL can take that concept and deliver the capability at an unheard-of scale,” he said.

Providing Customers an Experience

The software leader fulfils their customers’ business requirements through two extreme approaches. Shesh, who joined HCL in 1997, elaborated that “one is absolute standardised software. Second is that you sit across from a customer, get needed specifications, and start building it from scratch.”

“Instead of waiting for years for that software to come in the next series software, we make it available to expedite and speed up the capability of the software they deploy. At the same time, keep the risks at cost manageable,” he explained how the company foundationally engages with its customers.

Additionally, Kumar highlighted, “We can do things very differently because we have the engineering scale not to think like a traditional software company that everyone should fit into a business slice.” Across 132 countries, HCLSoftware has more than a thousand business partners. “You can pick any timezone starting from the International Date Line. We have customers north to south from the Arctic and Antarctic. We are the only software company built out of engineering services heritage,” he gladly boasted.

HCLSoftware intends to help customers extract value from their investments. “The core principle of our business is that our software should get used,” added Shesh. He further said that HCLSoftware has generated the bulk of its business by providing new capabilities to its clients. 

The organisation’s goal is to keep customers abreast of everything new in technology. “This whole process is connected so that we understand that the technology is being created based on what the customer is seeking from us,” Shesh explained.

“That cycle is going on,” the industry veteran said, reflecting on the growing clientele across 130+ countries. “Our customers are our best salespeople. They’re the ones who provide references,” he added. 

Mapping History

HCLSoftware was created by HCLTech with the single purpose of building a software production business. “It was a very conscious plan decision and a curation of intellectual property acquired from IBM, Cisco and a few others,” recalled Kumar, who has worked with HCL for over two decades. 

“We’ve got a set of capabilities which enable businesses to rewire and run the company in a digital plus enterprise economy. We help them attract prospects, transact and nurture the customer lifecycle, “he said, 

But that is one part of our business. The second is the world’s most extensive portfolio of low code and no code capabilities, which the team inherited, noted Kumar. The company’s low code development platform, HCL Volt MX, has proven exceptional as it provides solutions to customers like Ferrari. 

Kumar noted that the third is the suite of products around hybrid data. “We believe the world of data cannot get on the cloud or on-prem. It has got to be hybrid consistently,” he added, emphasising the company’s focus on cloud. 

HCLSoftware also has the Intelligent Automation Cloud Suite, which can securely deploy, develop, and build applications and manage endpoints, observability, AIops, and the whole lifecycle. 

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Public cloud has been transformative for businesses over the years, however, country-specific jurisdiction laws and data protection concerns have brought in a growing emphasis on sovereign cloud. According to a recent survey by HCLTech, approximately 24% of organisations are planning to migrate a portion of their data from the cloud to on-premise data centres within the next three years. 

One of the things that the survey did indicate was a huge interest in sovereign cloud, according to Alan Flower, EVP and head – Cloud Native and GenAI Labs, HCLTech. “Often what is driving this migration back to on-premise is security or regulatory adherence. There is this kind of awareness from clients that they may benefit from moving into a sovereign cloud, typically to align with their country preferences,” Flower said.

However, another interesting observation from Flower was that many organisations’ migration to the cloud was not transformational, but transitional. If organisations moved their IT from their data centres to someone else’s data centres, the cost savings for them were not very evident. 

“In my view, the potential cost savings can have an immensely transformative effect on your business, especially if you’re on a journey of transformation. However, if your ambitions are not aligned with this transformation and you’re merely migrating your IT infrastructure to the cloud, you might find yourself in a situation a couple of years later wondering where the expected impact has gone.”

Demand for sovereign cloud to grow 

Sovereign cloud is a cloud infrastructure that is subject to the laws and regulations of a specific country or region designed to ensure data sovereignty, which means that data is subject to the laws and governance of the country in which it is hosted.

Over the years, data protection concerns and laws have resulted in a significant rise in the demand for sovereign cloud. Flower expects the trend around sovereign cloud to continue. A focus on security and regulatory concerns is driving a lot of the activities.

“Especially in Europe, we notice a pronounced emphasis on sovereign cloud, which is not a trend seen worldwide but is notably prominent in this continent.” For example, earlier this month, AWS, the largest hyperscaler by market size, announced the release of AWS European Sovereign Cloud. 

However, going forward, the demand for sovereign cloud may further rise due to the implementation of data protection laws in various countries. For instance, in India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2023 has been approved by both Houses of the Parliament and is expected to be enacted soon. This legislation might require certain organisations, especially those in highly regulated industries to store their data locally or opt for a sovereign cloud solution.

“Moreover, I see lots of indications that clients are increasingly happy to consume what I would call a hybrid-multi-cloud estate. Many clients have adopted a flexible approach that enables them to relocate data workloads to the most suitable destinations. I anticipate that clients will take advantage of this flexibility, making decisions based on efficiency gains or enhanced transformative potential when moving workloads to more appropriate locations.”

Opting for a hybrid cloud strategy

In the future, more and more organisations are expected to adopt a hybrid model strategy recognising that some workloads and data are best suited for on-premises data centres, while others benefit from cloud delivery.

Notably, container-based infrastructure, exemplified by technologies like Kubernetes, has gained significant traction, according to Flower.  These container platforms enable centralised management of multi-cloud environments from a single control plane. This approach offers two key advantages.

Firstly it offers centralised management, meaning organisations can efficiently manage all their workloads, regardless of their cloud environment, as a unified piece of infrastructure. This centralisation simplifies administration and reduces complexity. Secondly, it also brings in the advantage of workload portability which means organisations can seamlessly migrate workloads between on-premises data centres and various cloud providers.

This ease of movement enables organisations to choose cloud providers based on the specific services they offer.

“We are observing a growing trend where clients actively seek the inherent portability facilitated by containerisation. This portability appeals to clients because it allows them to transfer various applications and solutions between different cloud providers seamlessly. Clients appreciate the flexibility to choose providers based on the rich array of services each one offers,” Flower said.

Disconnect between IT and business 

The HCLTech report titled ‘Cloud Evolution: Make Innovation a Habit’ also states that many companies plan to increase their investments in cloud technologies going forward. This is mostly driven by a genuine appetite for transformation. 

However, Flower also notes that there exists a slight disconnect between IT and the business when it comes to the cloud. While business leaders expressed a clear understanding of how the cloud could address their challenges, such as responding quickly to customer needs, increasing agility, and fostering innovation, IT leaders had a different perspective. 

“The IT leaders were telling the survey that they believed that the business may not fully appreciate the cloud’s capabilities. Hence, there is a slight disconnect between the expectations of business leaders and IT leaders. While the businesses are really sold on the strategic benefits of cloud, the IT leaders just need to get a little bit closer to those business leaders to help them achieve that ambition,” Flower said.

To align with this perspective, IT should focus not only on technology but also on enabling cultural change. Organisations must ensure that IT functions support the business in achieving the expected agility and access to innovation, Flower concluded. 

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After launching the Generative AI Studio under its amplifAI0->∞ suite of AI offerings and solutions, Tech Mahindra chief executive and managing director CP Gurnani recently took to X to share that it is the first major Indian IT company to be working on their proprietary large language model called Project Indus. 

The open-source large language model aims to speak over 40 Indic languages in the first phase, including Kinnauri, Kangri, Chambeli, Garhwali, Kumaoni, Jaunsari and more. 

The “​​civilisational” initiative will be carried out by the Makers Lab of Tech Mahindra to develop India’s foundational model for various Indian languages, starting with Hindi. The project collects Hindi dialect speech data to train a language model using NLP algorithms. Contributors can anonymously submit short to extended speech samples with the option to delete recorded data. 

According to the official website, mobile numbers are optionally collected for reference and gamification purposes, with encryption and a retention period of up to seven years. No personal information will be shared with third parties. 

However, it is not yet clear whether Makers Lab will build the model from scratch or base it on top of any existing LLMs like GPT-4 or Llama 2 like Stanford’s Alpaca and Vicuna-13B.

Unpacking the Gen AI Vows of Indian IT

When it comes to generative AI, all other Indian IT giants have also poured sufficient funds. However, their excitement in channelling the full potential of generative AI has led to no real use cases. 

The Indian IT giants are forming partnerships to advance generative AI adoption. In an earlier interaction with AIM, Wipro CTO Subha Tatavarti said that the company has been working around generative AI for the past two years. Wipro teamed up with IIT Delhi to establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) as part of their USD 1 billion AI-driven innovation initiative in the Wipro ai360 ecosystem. They aim to combine Google Cloud’s generative AI with Wipro’s AI IP, business accelerators, and industry solutions. 

Meanwhile, HCL partnered with Microsoft and AWS to enhance their generative AI efforts, while TCS is collaborating with Google Cloud to utilise foundational models like Vertex AI and generative AI Application Builder. Infosys follows an “AI First” strategy, focusing on specialised AI models from open-source LLMs, using them to accelerate clients’ AI initiatives through their Topaz framework, which encompasses generative AI-based services, solutions, and platforms.

No Moat, Only Fluff Talk

This is not the first time that we have seen ITs jumping onto the bandwagon of something new, something that is trending in the tech ecosystem. When Meta introduced Metaverse with much fanfare, we saw a similar reaction. 

TCS started the trend, followed by Tech Mahindra and Infosys, all announcing their metaverse-related products and services in February of 2022. As a part of the metaverse programme, TCS’ “themaTiCS” suite targets improving remote work experiences where only 25% of employees are in the office at any time. Following the lead, Infosys introduced the Metaverse Foundry similar to Topaz, offering ready-to-use templates and is said to have found 100 use cases for enterprises to embrace metaverse offerings spanning XR consulting, blockchain consulting, digital twin and more. Tech Mahindra also introduced the TechMVerse, leveraging its 5G capabilities to deliver immersive experiences. 

However, when Meta pulled the plug on their Metaverse dream, Indian ITs seemed to have lost interest too. 

This time, Indic Languages are coming back to riding the generative AI wave, building indigenous LLMs in India is a huge growth opportunity considering that it is home to 122 major languages and 1599 other languages, along with 22 official languages, as per Census 2001. 

At present, 58.8% of the content is in English, followed by Russian, Spanish and French. Forget about native languages like Garhwali or Kumaoni, even Hindi does not make it to the top ten highlighting a significant shortage of local language content. 

Project Bhashini, was introduced in collaboration with Microsoft. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also introduced the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) in the 2021-22 budget.

Project Indus is an important initiative in this direction. Gurnani urged people from different vocabularies to contribute to making this project successful as an LLM is only as good as the data it is trained on. And Tech Mahindra is the only company to work on its promises.

Choosing AI Upskilling Over Model Building

When it comes to building its own LLMs, India is taking a different approach, focusing on the upskilling of their employees. This can be attributed to the fact that historically, technology adoptions have increased work volume, requiring more expertise and hands.

All the heads of these companies like K Krithivasan (TCS), Salil Parekh (Infosys) and C Vyakumar (HCL) have highlighted generative AI as the quarter one’s focal point of this year, with clients exploring its potential for enhancing productivity, content creation, and customer service. 

However, while generative AI is seeing a  strong interest, clients cutting back on IT spending is a concern for HCL and Infosys, impacting revenue growth forecasts, as per a report by The Register. Despite the short-term hype, executives believe AI will bring meaningful long-term benefits, although measuring its effectiveness remains challenging.

Tech Mahindra, Infosys, TCS, HCL and Wipro have expanded their partnerships with major tech players like AWS, Google and Microsoft partnerships to upskill employees in generative AI. Traditionally, the huge talent pool of India has been seen as beneficial for a quick adopter of technology and not building inhouse. And now with the upskilling, the process will only get faster and smoother.

Read more: Wipro’s Tryst With Generative AI Began Way Before ChatGPT

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Indian IT giant HCLTech has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate the adoption of generative AI at the company and by enterprises globally.

The collaboration aims to empower enterprises to harness the power of AWS’s advanced GenAI portfolio which includes Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Titan, AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia.

As part of the collaboration, HCLTech intends to use Amazon CodeWhisperer with over 50,000 HCLTech engineers, cloud practitioners and developers to build secure applications and leverage AI responsibly, internally and for clients.

HCLTech will also integrate its Advantage Cloud platform for automated mass application migration to cloud with Amazon CodeWhisperer, enabling automated rehosting, refactoring and re-platforming treatments with a centralized dashboard to monitor and plan migrations.

The AWS-HCLTech collaboration demonstrates a shared commitment to exploring industry solutions leveraging AI advancements. For instance, HCLTech developed Ziva on AWS, an AI bot for the financial services industry. HCLTech has also been recognized as an ML-powered Amazon Connect launch partner, further underscoring the strength of this strategic partnership.

“GenAI is a powerful technology that has the potential to revolutionize industries. By collaborating with AWS, we bring to our clients the latest GenAI capabilities to accelerate innovation and establish a robust global AI economy,” Prabhakar Appana, Senior Vice President and Head of AWS Ecosystem Business Unit, HCLTech, said.

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“Anxiety or Enthusiasm?” – asked Emily Chang at the Bloomberg Technology Summit.  

“You need to have both – the thoughtfulness, the understanding, the nuance, and the tension between the two exists everywhere,” said Sam Altman, sharing his experience after travelling the Far East, speaking to users, developers and world leaders. 

Altman’s observation pretty much sums up generative AI adoption in enterprises, globally. It has been creating quite a bit of stir for enterprises, fuelling both enthusiasm and anxiety. 

AIM got in touch with technology heads and CXOs of leading companies across industries, alongside tracking the trends, to understand their adoption strategies, and the answers were quite surprising. Unlike previous AI adoption, which were mostly top-down, generative AI adoption seems to be being pushed in all the directions – i.e. top-down as well as bottom-up. 

Bottom-Up Approach 

Ironically, this is also the first time in the history of AI adoption where the bottom-up approach is gaining immense traction, where employees and teams come together, identify opportunities with use cases and PoCs, and are later supported by top management. 

This is mostly driven by enthusiasm. 

Most of the startups and growing companies fall under this category. These organisations are mostly experimenting with generative AI to address needs that benefit the company and their customers. Hopefully, along the way it might improve efficiency and increase productivity. Some of the examples include Swiggy, MakeMyTrip, Tech Mahindra and others. 

Amitkumar Banka, head growth marketing at Swiggy told AIM that the company is using generative AI to create customised food images based on specific requirements on their platform, and this is helping them serve millions of customers.

“From a Swiggy perspective, it is a bottoms up approach. Most teams, including analytics, product, design, corporate strategy have come together to form a strong point of view in terms of how Swiggy should take generative AI to the next level. Each person and team are coming up with their own use cases to take advantage of generative AI.” 

Narasimha Medeme, VP head data science at MakeMyTrip, said that the company has launched conversational bot using combination of generative AI LLM models plus speech to text models for Bharat customers (English and Hindi), and has also embedded usages in SEO and hotel review NLU systems. “Multiple other use cases and bots are being tested in beta stage for Bharat customers.”

Top-Down Approach

Top-down approach has always been a go-to strategy for most companies, as it is faster and easier to consult and adopt. For instance, of late, a lot of IT companies – the likes of TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, Accenture, and others, are partnering with Microsoft and Google to unleash their generative AI initiatives, alongside other technology enablers like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce and Zoho. 

The adoption trickles down from the top. Qlik SVP Geoff Thomas believes that if a company wants to adopt a data culture and become a data-driven company, it would require strong sponsorship and support from the highest level of leadership. “It is often driven from the CEO, from top to bottom.” 

But, there is a flipside to this, this might be exciting for people on the top or leadership team to improve their efficiency and productivity, but it often fuels anxiety among employees and teams, particularly those who have been familiar with traditional methods and productivity tools. 

This also requires additional push from the organisation to offer training and certification programmes. Recently, Infosys announced a comprehensive and free AI certification training programme.

Hybrid Approach 

Here, most companies are following both top-down and bottom up approaches, alongside setting up a centre of excellence to fuel generative AI use cases. Some of the examples include HCL Tech, Infosys, Zoho, and others.

Infosys recently unveiled Topaz which is a set of solutions and platforms using generative technologies with 12000 AI use cases, and 150+ pretrained AI models. 

Wipro is also dwelling on a hybrid route. The company has partnered with Google Cloud to leverage its generative AI tools. Wipro will also integrate them with their own AI models, and pre-built industry solutions. 

So, What’s the Best Approach? 

In conversation with AIM, Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director – AI Research, Zoho Corp. vouches for hybrid approach, where he believes that the right mix of narrow and large models will be a win-win for companies and their customers. 

“Narrow AI, where one model is trained to do one task based on past experiences will thrive, helping companies automate redundant tasks. Whereas, LLM-based generative AI will augment these capabilities by offering seamless availability of information from across sources.” 

Zoho has a suite of 13 applications that is integrated with ChatGPT. “ Our focus right now will be to tightly integrate our AI stack across our product suites and also, in parallel, build in-house LLMs for businesses to provide seamless user experience in our offerings,” said Ramprakash. 

Each industry has its way of implementing generative AI in their functions. Deepika Kaushal, Deputy Vice President at Piramal Finance, confirmed to AIM that their company is still identifying use cases for generative AI applications and it is better for them to learn from the experts and later in future learn the capabilities to build in-house. 

On the other hand, Vivek Sahabadi, Head of Data Analytics at Navi, is of the opinion that the kind of data a company handles decides the right approach. “For fintech companies, where user data is critical, building their own models makes sense, whereas, in industries such as food tech, external models can be used.” 

All in all, it becomes important for companies to consider factors such as costing, expertise, data security, and in-house infra capabilities, before diving into the adoption of generative AI. Most importantly, the usefulness or second order understanding of generative AI should be established. One must not recklessly rush into it, irrespective of whether excitement or anxiety is pushing them towards it. 

The post How Companies are Botching Generative AI appeared first on AIM.

Indian IT’s preparation for the upcoming winter is making everyone feel the chill. Be it the freshers who didn’t receive the offer letters after months of waiting or mid-level employees who didn’t get variable pay or even the leadership team that is witnessing a series of resignations “to pursue other interests”. 

Last week, TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan decided to step down from his role and as his replacement, K Krithivasan was given the new position of CEO-designate. This came shortly after Tech Mahindra replaced its MD and CEO with Mohit Joshi, previously a director at Infosys. Another major announcement in the sector was Ravi Kumar, the former president of Infosys Global Services Organisation, leaving the company to become the global CEO of Cognizant. 

When it comes to leadership, HCL Tech’s Engineering and R&D head, Sukamal Banerjee stepped down from his position. Ranjan Kohli, who was in charge of WIPRO’s Integrated Digital, Engineering and Application Service Business Line, also resigned as per media reports. 

Why is this happening?

While both the top guns of TCS and Tech Mahindra are reflecting rather positive signs to the media, the reason behind the resignations is far more grave. 

For instance, while stepping down as the CEO of TCS, Rajesh Gopinathan asserted that his decision was rooted in wanting to pursue other interests. Although, many industry experts believe that the real reason behind the decision is something else. 

It was the first time that a TCS CEO was stepping down on their own. The IT giant has seen a relatively stable leadership when compared to its rivals, with only four CEOs since the establishment of the company. Gopinathan too was reappointed as the CEO for a five-year term until February 2027 last year. 

However, in Gopinathan’s second term, TCS couldn’t achieve the growth it had anticipated. While TCS recorded an inclination towards research under the leadership of Gopinathan, the company could not manifest the same success with the revamp in the organisation—leaving both investors and employees unhappy. 

Additionally, as reported in January, the macro slowdown of TCS with fewer deals and a negative headcount might have also pushed Gopinathan to this decision. 

In the third quarter of FY23, TCS received new orders worth $7.6 billion which, compared to the previous quarter ($8.1 billion), showed a decline by 3.7%. The book-to-bill ratio—which is the ratio of orders received to units shipped and billed for a particular period—also declined to 1.07x in Q3 2023. In Q3 2022, it was around 1.17x while the historical average since Q1 2019 is around 1.24x. 

In an increasingly identical manner, while interacting with the media, Tech Mahindra’s Gurnani attempted to assert that everything was under control by putting out statements like, “I became a CXO at the age of 38 and am now stepping down at the age of 65. All I’m trying to say is that I’ve been a playing captain for a very long time. I will become a coach. I will no longer be a playing captain”. But, even with such open reassurance, all did not seem well at Tech Mahindra.

For the past couple of months, Tech Mahindra was trying to find a replacement for Gurnani in the internal leadership team, with Manish Vyas, Jagdish Mitra, and Lakshmanan Chidama being the first choice. However, the company had to take a bet on an outsider like Joshi, who had a far better record at Infosys than its own leadership pool. The tech giant is also facing problems in Europe and USA to bag significant deals. Additionally, from the past couple of quarters, Tech Mahindra did not record positive results in its quarterly results as well. 

In FY23 Q3, Tech Mahindra recorded a 5% decline in its quarterly profit, citing a challenging economic climate. The IT firm’s net profit for Q3—ending December 31, 2022—was INR 1,296.6 crore, decreasing from the previous year’s INR 1,368.5 crore.

Infosys, the real leader generator 

With all the reshuffling going around in the Indian IT sector, one thing that is constantly talked about is how Infosys has now emerged as the new leader generator, with several from its leadership team leaving and taking the positions of CEOs in different companies. 

Mohit Joshi and Ravi Kumar are just the tip of the iceberg when we see the long list of ex-Infosys employees currently in leading roles. Before Kumar, there were at least twelve leaders who’d left the company to take significant positions at different companies.

This is due to a very peculiar reason. All the Infosys founders, at a very early stage, had declared that their children won’t be becoming the CEOs in future. That led to Matthew Frank Barney, the then head of leadership development at Infosys Leadership Institute, seeking a structured way to look at and develop leaders. 

The company follows a three-level process to identify potential leaders. In the first level, the company scouts for 50 Infoscians with approximately 15 years of experience—holding positions as geographical heads or business unit heads—who have the potential to join the board within three to five years. 

Moving on to the second level, the focus is on finding leaders who can either make it to the first level or lead a business unit within three to five years. The company seeks at least 150 employees—including vice-presidents and those reporting to unit heads—who possess around ten years of experience. 

Finally, at the third and last level, the search is for leaders who can progress to the second level. The company selects from a pool of approximately 550 business and technology managers who are associate VPs or below, having five to seven years of experience.

The post The Great Indian IT Reshuffling appeared first on AIM.

When the Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway starrer ‘The Intern’ was released, it not only showed the unorthodox chemistry of the leads but also touched upon the theme of age discrimination in the workplace. Although a work of fiction, it bears an uncanny resemblance to actual events in the IT sector, and may not be purely coincidental, after all.

Millennials and Gen Z comprise 68 to 70% and 18 to 20%of the workforce, respectively. PayScale reports that top tech companies have the median employee age at three industry leaders—Facebook, LinkedIn, and SpaceX—under 29. Only three businesses—IBM, Oracle, and HP—have a median employee age of over 33.

Dispelling the Myths of Ageism in Indian Tech

Indian ITs are not far behind when it comes to age bias. As per a research by AIM, in India, major tech firms have substantially fewer senior folks beyond 50 years. For instance, both Infosys and TCS have around 50% employees between the age bracket of 20 and 35 years, 40% between 35 and 50 years, and a mere 10% above 50 years. On the other hand, IBM has 45% between 20 and 35 years, 30% between 35 and 50 years, and 25% above 50 years.

In their latest yearly income report, IT giants like Tech Mahindra and TCS saw a loss of over 6,000 and 2,200 employees, respectively. The companies are still focused on hiring freshers and are expected to recruit a total of 1.57 lakh new graduates by the end of FY23. In 2021, Infosys and TCS conducted campus hiring and onboarded 61,000 freshers. Infosys plans to hire more than 50,000 freshers in FY 2023, while TCS aims to recruit over 40,000 individuals.

In retrospect, about twelve years ago, Infosys had to face a few lawsuits regarding age discrimination from applicants over 50. Interestingly, it also discriminates against consultants of Indian origin, which is undoubtedly ironic. 

“A survey by JobBuzz found that 33 percent of employees in India face or have faced age-based biases at their workplace. Despite legal protections, age discrimination can still occur in the workplace in various forms, such as not hiring older workers, denying promotions or benefits to older employees, or forcing early retirement. While some countries have put strong labour laws against it, the Indian ecosystem is still evolving, and the timing is just about right to bring in law against age-based employment discrimination,” Aditya Malik, founder of ValueMatrix.ai told AIM.  

But unlike the US, India does not have a law against age discrimination as yet. 

New Tech, Age-Old Problem

Last month, IBM relocated 80 AIX employees to India in the third quarter of 2022 amid reports that the “redeployed” employees were older and senior, sparking conversations about age discrimination in tech. The company has faced similar allegations in the past, including a 2018 lawsuit claiming IBM fired 20,000 ‘dinobabies’ over 40 to make space for a younger workforce. IBM has also recently settled a lawsuit with the family of Jorgen Lohnn, an employee who died by suicide after being fired. Despite denials from the company, the case highlights a broader problem of age discrimination in the tech industry.

Not just IBM, several other tech giants too have been accused of the same. In 2019, Google agreed to pay $11 million to end a class-action lawsuit brought by 227 individuals over 40 who alleged age discrimination during the hiring process. The lawsuit was filed by software engineer Cheryl Fillekes, who was highly qualified but repeatedly rejected by Google between 2007-2014, starting when she was 47.

According to AIM Recruits, most companies do not have an age policy while recruiting. But whenever they refuse to hire elderly folks it is because the specific job might be physically or mentally strenuous. Senior employees are laid off to cut expenses as they are generally highly paid.

Echoing similar sentiments, Malik said that senior employees might face a greater risk of being laid off due to factors such as higher compensation and benefits and the perception that they are less productive and may not be as adaptable to evolving technologies.

Many tech companies have come under fire for their preference towards younger generations over elders. From Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial comment in 2007, stating that “young people are just smarter“, to the lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against IBM for the alleged age discrimination, ageism in the tech ecosystem is a topic that continues to make headlines.

But why does this preference exist? 

It stems from the perception that older generations are less flexible, unwilling to adapt to new technologies and are expensive. According to a study by Professor Andrea Rosales of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, ageist attitudes are present in the tech ecosystem worldwide.

While a large majority of companies focus on inclusivity and diversity, they often overlook the experience that senior folks can bring to the table.

In an industry where there is only a mere 10% of senior executives in IT and tech companies, it becomes important for companies to reassess the situation and support senior talent. 

The post Is Age Discrimination in Tech for Real?  appeared first on AIM.

After Twitter, Meta and Google and other tech companies, Adobe has joined the list of tech companies that have laid off employees to cut costs.

It has laid off nearly 100 employees in domains concentrated on sales. The company, however, said it is not doing mass layoffs and is still hiring for critical roles. As per its Q3 2022 financial report, Adobe employed nearly 2,700 workers.

However, the scale of layoffs at Adobe is much less than companies like Meta, Amazon and Twitter. For example, in June 2022, Internet streaming giant, ‘Netflix’ laid off 300 employees—i.e., 4% of its workforce in the second round of job cuts. 

In July, Tesla laid off 229 annotation employees from its Autopilot team and shut down one of its US offices. In early November, Twitter laid off nearly 50% of its workforce and 4400 contractual workers, while Meta laid off nearly 11,000 employees comprising a little over one-tenth of its global workforce. The layoffs were the first major reductions to occur in the company’s 18-year history.

This spree of layoffs comes after tech giants such as Netflix, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, and Apple have lost a combined market value of $2.5 trillion. Out of all the companies, Meta ranked the highest, where the company lost about $640 billion market cap. 

Meanwhile, Tech major Amazon is also set to fire about 20,000 employees to streamline costs.

At the same time, some Indian tech firms like BYJU’s, Josh, and HealthifyMe have also fired hundreds of employees in the last few weeks. Approximately 13,618 employees were laid off Indian startups in 2022.

For instance, edtech giant BYJU’S laid off 2,500 employees, about 5% of its 50,000 workforce. This decision by the management came after a decrease in its revenue.

Another Indian e-commerce unicorn, Udaan laid off nearly 350 employees. The company’s spokesperson said in a statement that this step was taken as a measure to achieve profitability, alongside increasing the efficiency of the business by reducing redundancies.

Indian IT wins in job stability 

At a time when product companies are choosing to cut jobs to save costs, IT services major Accenture has promoted over 60,000 employees in India out of 157,000 promotions that it distributed globally during the financial year 2022. The number of promotions grew rapidly in the last one year when the tech talent war gained momentum.

Indian IT giants Infosys, TCS, Wipro and HCL are expected to hire a total of 1.57 lakh freshers before the end of this fiscal year.

The post Adobe Joins Layoff Trend, Fires 100 Employees appeared first on AIM.

Following the widely publicised layoff of approximately 7,500 employees at Twitter, Meta also laid off more than 11,000 workers or more than 12.5% of the overall workforce. The FAANG companies—Meta (previously Facebook), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—are all product-based companies and are the ones most affected by the layoffs. It is important to keep in mind that while companies that provide services such as the WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, and HCL Tech) are regularly hiring, employees of product-based tech companies around the world are staring death in the face in the form of layoffs.

Indian product-based businesses like Byju’s, Cars24, Meesho, Ola, and Udaan are also impacted by the winter of layoffs, in addition to American product-based IT corporations. According to accounts, Byju laid off nearly 2,500 workers. Overall, product-based IT companies have trouble either selling their goods or keeping up with their product development in the post-COVID world.

While Apple has witnessed a drop in customer spending, Meta can’t justify its investment in Mark Zuckerberg’s grandiose initiative, ‘Metaverse’. While Netflix sees a decline in overall content consumers as a result of the growing competition abroad, Amazon is suffering losses as a result of rising inflation. Similar circumstances apply to Indian businesses; according to media sources, approximately 15,700 employees will be laid off solely by Indian product-based startups in 2022.

What happened at FAANG? 

Since tech companies are typically insulated from the common issues of the world, layoffs in the industry are a sign of worldwide recession. For instance, during the COVID-19 epidemic, when the majority of the world’s businesses were failing, the IT industry was earning significant profits. But in 2022, the majority of the IT companies across the globe are laying off workers in an effort to cut costs. This practice is occurring on such a large scale that a web portal was developed to assist the affected.

In light of the development of such a website dedicated to tech layoffs, one is unable to ignore that the winter has arrived for techies on a global scale. But, it may still be worth deliberating about what happened to the FAANG companies. 

The whole fiasco started when the US central bank began increasing the federal fund rate to tackle the inflation in the country. In May 2022, the federal fund rate started the streak of increasing its interest rate that continued as recently as November. 

The federal fund rate is the interest rate that banks charge other banks for lending them money on an overnight basis—typically, extra cash that is in their reserve balances.

If interest rates are not kept in check, they will soon surpass the levels seen during the dotcom bubble and the infamous 2008 recession. And as interest rates rise, borrowing costs for businesses rise concurrently—bringing about the demise of stocks that heavily rely on capital.

Since most tech companies are either unprofitable or have minuscule profits, they were unable to handle the increase in the federal fund rate. The pandemic-era interest rate cuts intended to stimulate the flow of funds into the market while also encouraging tech businesses to invest more—which ultimately turned out to be a bad move now that interest rates are at an all-time high.

How is WITCH more secure? 

There is a widely-held belief that when US stock prices decline, it has an impact on other markets. There is no doubt that Indian tech companies did experience stock losses, but the stock of one of the country’s major software firms, Tata Consultancy Services, only fell 5.4% in a year compared to the 65.8% decline for Meta.

Additionally, the WITCH companies are hiring more people than ever. Till September 2022, TCS hired over 30,000 people, and this year alone, they plan to hire an additional 11~12,000 freshers. The WITCH companies recruited nearly 105,000 new professionals in the first half of 2022.

The rationale for Indian tech businesses’ continued hiring and lower rate of layoffs is their service-based business strategy. The majority of Indian IT firms offer consulting and other services to businesses abroad; as a result, the US accounts for 40–78% of their overall income, with TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Tech Mahindra having greater than 50% exposure. About 55% of the global market share for IT services is held by Indian companies.

These companies are also the least affected by recession as a result of this strategy. Indian tech enterprises did not experience the 2008 recession as severely as other global corporations did. Since every nation is currently spending extensively on IT services, Indian IT companies are relatively safe in the face of this slow and unstable market, according to Kodak Institutional Equities. The supply-chain and retail sectors are likely to be the most impacted by the impending global recession, not the IT or financial services sectors.

Wrapping Up

While FAANG companies are trying too hard to minimise the costs by implementing harsh cost-cutting measures such as laying off a significant portion of their workforces, it’d be interesting to see what direction Indian IT companies ultimately take to tackle the worsening economic situation. 

The companies in the product segment discussed before will likely witness a decline in profit during the recession and may continue the trend of laying off employees and reducing the size of their workforces, but the segment driving the Indian tech ecosystem—the service providers—may not witness a concurrent change in the strategy of operations.

The post The Rise of Indian WITCH and the Fall of US FAANG appeared first on AIM.

In 2021, the economic optimism and availability of large capital stimulated domestic mergers and acquisitions (M&A) led by companies that liquidated non-core assets to streamline corporate structure and use cash to purchase assets, a PWC report showed. The major deals in the IT sector last year included Wipro’s Capco acquisition for USD 1.5 billion and Byju’s Great Learning (USD 600 million) and Epic (USD 500 million) purchases. The trend is likely to continue in 2022.

Reliance’s stake in Addverb

Reliance Industries Limited spent USD 132 million to pick up a 54% stake in Addverb Technologies, an Indian robotics startup. The Noida-based startup focuses on building automation and robotics solutions for warehouses and factories. Reliance has been already using Addverb’s robotic conveyors, pick-by-voice software, and semi-automated systems in its warehouses. Addverb churns out around 10,000 robots in a calendar year, including mobile robots, sorting robots, pallets shuttle and carton shuttle. And 80% of the startup’s revenue comes from the domestic market.

The robotics startup plans to use Reliance’s resources to achieve its goal of becoming a billion-dollar company in the next five years by targeting the global market.

HCL’s majority stake in GBS & Starschema acquisition 

HCL Technologies has acquired a majority stake (51%) in German IT consulting firm Gesellschaft fr Banksysteme GmbH (GBS). The remaining stake (49%) is with the largest German cooperative primary bank Deutsche Apotheker- und rztebank eG (apoBank).

Additionally, HCL has agreed to buy the Budapest-based company Starschema in a deal worth USD 42.5 million to strengthen its data engineering services and build a stronghold in Central and Eastern Europe. The deal is subject to regulatory clearance from the Hungarian Ministry of Innovation and Technology and is expected to be completed by March 2022. Starschema, founded in 2006, offers consulting, technology, and managed services in data engineering.

The deal will enable HCL to provide data engineering consulting and near-shore access to digital engineering services to a bigger pool of clients. The main idea behind the acquisition is to utilise Starschema’s data-focused expertise with HCL’s industry presence for a data-driven transformation.

Infosys buys Oddity

Infosys has signed a definitive agreement to acquire oddity, a German digital marketing, experience, and commerce agency. The move will reinforce Infosys’ creative, branding and experience design capabilities and demonstrates its continued commitment to co-create with clients and help them navigate their digital transformation journey.

“Using oddity’s digital commerce, marketing knowledge, and metaverse-ready set-up, it easily complements Infosys’ prowess in technological transformation,” said Ravi Kumar S, Infosys President, in a statement. 

oddity has a comprehensive service portfolio comprising digital-first brand management and communication, in-house production, including virtual and augmented reality, experience design and e-commerce services across Europe and China. The acquisition will power Infosys’ metaverse play. 

Tech Mahindra buys Thirdware, picks stake in Geomatic.AI

Tech Mahindra has acquired Mumbai-based enterprise applications startup Thirdware in an all-cash deal worth USD 42 million.

Thirdware, founded in 1995 by Bhavesh Shah, offers solutions and services in the consulting, design, development, implementation and support of packaged solutions and covers areas like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Thirdware delivers cutting edge business solutions and services to over 300 customers across the globe which includes Ford Motor Company, Pfizer, United Nations Organizations, Visteon, etc.

Thirdware’s capability to provide end-to-end implementations and global rollouts of ERP solutions will give Tech Mahindra an edge in the manufacturing space.

Tech Mahindra has bought 80 percent stake in Geomatic.AI through its Singapore-based subsidiary. “As part of this deal, Tech Mahindra will have 80 percent shareholding in Geomatic.AI for consideration of Australian dollar 6 million. Ausnet will have 20 percent shareholding and transfer digital workforce, intellectual property, assets and client contracts to the newly formed entity,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

Geomatic.AI will continue its focus on digital platforms-led non-linear growth in partnership with AusNet Services, an Australian energy and utility distributor. The company’s highly differentiated IP will allow Tech Mahindra to offer Drone Technologies, Digital Twins, AI-led services to linear asset-intensive industries such as energy and utilities, transportation, oil and gas etc.

The post Top tech mergers and acquisitions in India (so far) appeared first on AIM.

Metaverse is not just a buzzword anymore. More and more organisations are keen to get in on the action and committing resources to build metaverse capabilities. According to Gartner, 25% of the people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse for work, shopping, education, social media and entertainment.

Inarguably, metaverse is a huge business opportunity. Globally, companies across sectors such as banking, retail, IT or analytics are setting aside funds to bring out products and experiences for metaverse. Taking the cue, Indian IT firms are jumping on the metaverse bandwagon. Let us look at a few companies offering services in metaverse or planning to do so soon.

Infosys 

Infosys has launched metaverse foundry that leverages domain and design expertise, platforms and digital accelerators to give enterprises on-demand ability to securely and efficiently create their own metaverse environment, deliver superior experiences in an existing metaverse, bring advanced AI-powered data analytics and simulations to fulfil their goals while adapting to new priorities and emerging market trends. Infosys has come out with over 100 ready-to-apply use cases and templates that use technologies like AR/VR, IoT, NFT, Applied AI, cybersecurity to accelerate value exploration in the metaverse. The global corporate university of Infosys will also be a part of the metaverse.

Additionally, Infosys’ Living Labs program will help create innovative solutions for clients by contextualizing emerging technologies.

For more details, click here.

Tech Mahindra

Few days back, Tech Mahindra announced its foray into metaverse with the launch of TechMVerse to provide interactive and immersive experiences to its consumers. The tech giant will use its network and technological capabilities in AI, blockchain, AR and VR, 5G, quantum computing to build B2B use cases for various sectors.

Initially, Tech Mahindra will cash in on several opportunities in metaverse through use cases such as:

• DealerVerse – metaverse-based car dealership.
•  Middlemist -a NFT marketplace
• Meta Bank – a virtual bank, and gaming centre

It will also provide low code plug and play NFTs and blockchain platforms. Along with Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, it will provide Digital Collectibles, which will be up for sale through Tech Mahindra’s NFT Marketplace platform.

TCS

Earlier, Krishnan Ramanujam, president and head of business and technology services at TCS, has discussed the company’s plans for the metaverse. In an interaction with a media house, he said TCS is taking an active interest in metaverse and has put out proposals for its customers, though they are still small in size. It is expected that the numbers will rise over the next five years.

He also talked about how the metaverse has its foundation in the cloud. The metaverse is ripe for faster uptake as companies adopt it for various use cases, he added.

Ramanujam said the company has already built a proof of concept for employee on-boarding and customer experience, which is now in production.

HCL

In a blog post last year, the vice president and the associate general manager of HCL talked about how extended reality (XR) is at the point of redefining business processes. The workforce challenges faced during the COVID-19 era are a catalyst in transforming the adoption of XR, the blog read.

Recently, Trendforce came out with a report that showed that AR/VR headset shipments are projected to reach 14.19 million units in 2022 from 9.86 million units last year, riding on the metaverse buzz. 

HCL is building industry-specific solutions and partnerships to emerge as a leader in the XR technology space. “We could not be more excited to be part of the journey to uncover the future of XR and metaverse,” the company said.

The post Which Indian IT majors have started service unit on Metaverse appeared first on AIM.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, organisations had to undergo a rapid digital transformation in order to sustain their businesses. This was possible only through good technology support and software capabilities. Due to this, despite facing some challenges in the lockdown imposed nationwide, IT companies recovered quite well with good hiring growth. A Naukri JobSpeak report said that the demand in tech has continued to rise as the sector witnessed a significant 85% Y-O-Y growth in October 2021.

Let’s look at some of the major hirings that took place this year:

TCS

In July, the company’s chief of global human resources, Milind Lakkad, said that the IT giant would be hiring more than 40,000 freshers from campuses in the country in the financial year 2021-22. It had hired 40,000 graduates from campuses last year as well. He added that lateral hiring would also be robust this year. It will also aim to improve on the number of trainees hired from American campuses last year.

Wipro

In a recent interview with Moneycontrol, Wipro’s Chief Financial Officer Jatin Dalal said that the company will hire 16,000 to 17,000 freshers in the current financial year as against its previous estimates of 12,000. It had hired 8,100 freshers in the June-September quarter and plans to recruit 40 per cent more freshers than originally planned as the present high rate of attrition can continue for the next few quarters.

HCL

Recently, HCL had launched its Amazon Web Services (AWS) Business Unit (AWS BU) to help enterprises globally accelerate their cloud transformation. At the moment, it has more than 10,000 professionals trained on AWS and plans to boost this capacity to more than 20,000 specialists in the future, said the company.

Cognizant

As per media reports, Cognizant said it expects to offer jobs to 45,000 new graduates in India in the fourth quarter for onboarding in 2022. In addition, it has reported a 56.3 per cent rise in September quarter net income at $544 million.

Amazon

In September, Amazon said it plans to hire more than 8,000 direct jobs across 35 cities this year. These roles will be across corporate, technology, customer service and operations roles. The hiring will occur across 35 cities in the country, like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Kanpur, Ludhiana, Pune, Surat, etc.

EY

Consulting leader EY said at the end of 2020 that it will hire 9000 new hires in India in various technology roles across all member firms, including the global delivery centres, in 2021. These hires will be from the STEM background and in areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, cyber security, analytics and other emerging technologies. Currently, 36% of all EY India employees are from a STEM background. Through this hiring process, it wants to expand its digital capabilities and help organisations solve their complex end-to-end business transformation challenges.

Ola

As per reports, Ola recently said that it plans to hire 10,000 people, as it eyes a leadership position with $2 billion gross merchandise value (GMV) for its vehicle commerce platform Ola Cars over the next 12 months. In addition, the company said that Ola Cars would be operational in 30 cities over the next two months and expand to 100 cities by next year across key areas, including sales and service centres.

PayPal

At the beginning of the year, PayPal said that it would hire over 1,000 engineers for its India development centres in Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad in 2021. The hirings will occur across software, product development, data science, risk analytics, and business analytics streams at entry, mid-level and senior roles.

The post Major Hiring Announcements By Tech Giants In 2021 appeared first on AIM.

HCL Technologies recently announced that the company will be adding 10,000 professionals to boost its newly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) Business Unit (AWSBU) to help enterprises worldwide accelerate their cloud transformation journey. 

The new devoted business unit inside HCL will be supported by AWS engineering, options and business groups which will help businesses modernise their legacy systems and mainframe applications and reliably adopt cloud technologies that boost efficiency, achieve objectives and meet regulatory compliance, all the while migrating and managing SAP workloads on AWS.

HCL currently holds five AWS competencies, has more than 10,000 professionals trained on AWS, and plans to boost this capacity to more than 20,000 specialists in the near future.

“HCL is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner capable of providing an end-to-end road map for adopting AWS to best serve our mutual customers, with a firm heritage in modernising infrastructure, applications and data. With the launch of the HCL AWS Business Unit, HCL will leverage its vertical-first focus on FSI, telco, and energy and utilities plus deep technical expertise on SAP, contact centres, hybrid cloud and mainframe modernisation transform businesses and consumer behaviour using technology when they need it the most,” said Doug Yeum, Head of WW Channels and Alliances, AWS.

Kalyan Kumar, Chief Technology Officer and Head, Ecosystems, HCL Technologies, said, “The AWS BU is an important part of our larger #HCLCloudSmart strategy in servicing every aspect of cloud delivery to build effective ecosystems that help our customers stay ahead of their competitors. Leveraging our extensive relationship with AWS, the AWS BU synergises the best of what both companies have to offer, driving digital, cultural and customer-centric transformations.”

HCL will also provide end-to-end AWS Managed Services through HCL’s ElasticOps and help build mature solutions on AWS, optimise costs and provide improved business agility. 

The unit will assist enterprise shoppers to modernise and migrate at scale, maintain value benefits and deal with experimentation by combining HCL’s expertise and experience in constructing adaptive cloud smart portfolios and AWS’ depth and breadth of companies and fast innovation. HCL is uniquely positioned to help enterprises, both as a global systems integrator (GSI) and an independent software vendor (ISV), with a cloud-focused ecosystem and product innovation strategy. 

The company unit also hopes to facilitate revenue growth and user experience by developing customised industry solutions built with AWS services and investment.

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HCL pledges to support the Delhi Government with 12,000 oxygen cylinders and 21 oxygen plants to fight the second wave of COVID-19. Each of the 12,000 oxygen cylinders has a capacity of 40 litres and the oxygen plants will generate 8800 litres of oxygen per minute, catering to around 1500 patients at a time. 

According to reports, two of these ready-to-use Oxygen Plants which are being imported from France have already been delivered and will get installed at Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in New Delhi.

More than 1500 employees of the company have been affected by Covid. The IT giant has been trying every possible way to help the country and its employees during this unprecedented time. Recently, the company has also offered a Rs 30-lakh insurance cover and an additional Rs 7-lakh employee deposit insurance cover to employees for Covid. 

According to sources, the Chief Human Resources Officer at HCL, Apparao V V stated, “We are also providing medical cover for three years to the affected families, children’s education cover for five years, and are providing training to their spouses wherever they are keen on joining us.”

HCL has created isolation beds across campuses. It has enhanced helplines, 46 doctors and 31 nurses – for medical advice. The company also stated that it is in the process of creating a corpus to support affected employees. HCL has already created a ‘Power of One’ corpus, where every employee contributes Re 1 every day to assist those employees. 

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HCL has announced that the company is extending support for COVID-19 care facilities in NCR in order to bolster the state’s efforts to manage the huge number of infections in the national capital. 

The support includes assistance in the form of more than 500 hospital beds at various facilities such as the Commonwealth Games Village, Holy Family Hospital, Sama Hospital and Lok Nayak Hospital in New Delhi; and Government Institute of Medical Sciences, Greater Noida Authority.

The IT giant has also been extending its support for critical human resources to treat the high number of COVID positive patients at the CWG facility, by partnering with Doctors For You to provide doctors, nursing staff, orderlies, supervisors, counsellors, lab technicians and administration staff.

At the Commonwealth Games Village (CWG), in partnership with the Government of Delhi and Doctors for You, HCL has also supported the import and installation of an oxygen plant for the facility which can provide continuous oxygen supply directly to the beds. 

The CWG COVID facility which was shut in December 2020, due to a fall in COVID cases, has been restarted and was officially inaugurated by Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister of Delhi on April 18, 2021.

Recently, the IT company has also announced that the company is shifting some of its workloads from India in order to combat the current situation of COVID-19 in India. The IT major aims to provide tangible assistance to meet real needs on the ground, as the COVID 19 pandemic continues across the country. The company is working with a hospital to set up a facility at two of its campuses to ensure employees get access to healthcare services. 

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HCL Technologies has announced that the company is shifting some of its workloads from India in order to combat the current situation of COVID-19 in India. Engaging closely with clients to prioritise work, the IT major shifts some workloads from India to other geographies in order to sustain the business continuity.

Vijayakumar said, “We have a global organisation. We already have almost 30 per cent of our workforces present outside India. Some geographies have stabilised and their vaccination levels are very high, so they are taking a little more load. Everybody’s very understanding of the situation, clients and our employees in other geographies.”

“Clients are very understanding and supportive. And we are working with them to see how, if there is a shortfall of people in certain operations, what can we do to offset that, how can we prioritise some work over the other…very active conversations happen on a continuous basis,” he added.

According to sources, C Vijayakumar, President of HCL Technologies stated that the company is working with clients to prioritise important work. At present, the IT major is working on various additional capabilities, such as 5G, Industry 4.0, AR/VR, among others. The company intends to hire about 20,000 freshers in FY22 and is expecting to register double-digit growth in FY22 revenues. 

Vijayakumar stated, “The markets that we are currently very strong and prominently present in are the US, UK and Nordics. These markets are very strong and we have a large presence there. We also have a presence in France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Australia…we want to scale our presence in these markets in line with the IT spend in these markets.”

The company is working with a hospital to set up a facility at two of its campuses to ensure employees get access to healthcare services. The tech giant is hopeful of the situation starting to moderate over the next couple of weeks.

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HCL Technologies, one of the leading Indian IT services companies has become the third best in the country, beating Wipro as it cloaks a two-digit annual growth rate in the last financial year.

IT services major has surpassed Wipro to occupy the post, as its revenue reached a whopping $8.63 billion, earning HCL a 10 percent hike as compared to the previous years. While Wipro earned a revenue of $8.12 million, which is just 3.8 per cent more when compared to what they achieved in the last fiscal.

This sudden spike in HCL’s revenue has made it the third best in the country and is succeeded by Infosys which grew by 9 per cent and TCS leading the growth with an impressive 11.4 per cent for the last fiscal.

“For the whole financial year, the net profit of Shiv Nadar-promoted firm crossed Rs 10,000 crore to reach Rs 10,123 crore, up 15.3 per cent year-on-year. Similarly, revenues were Rs 60,427 crore, a rise of around 20 per cent on a year-on-year basis,” a leading business daily noted.

Investment in IBM’s Products Paid Off

One of the major determinants for HCL’s outstanding performance comes from its investment in IBM products, which played a crucial role in directly boosting HCL’s incremental revenues, which stood at $794 million for the last fiscal year. Of the total revenue, $300 million dollars was generated from IBM products alone which constituted 38 per cent of the incremental revenues.

The move to procure large-scale IBM products was taken, following HCL’s decision to set-up up exclusive products and services groups and had earmarked $3.02 billion to build a software product business.

Following on this line, the HCL inked a $1.8 billion deal with IBM where it purchased a host of products ranging from automation tools to secure device management.

“The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets. I am confident that these products will see good growth trajectory backed by our commitment to investing in product innovation coupled with our strong client focus and agile product development. In addition, we see tremendous potential for creating compelling ‘as-a-service’ offerings by combining these products with our Mode-1 and Mode-2 services,” C Vijayakumar, President & CEO, HCL Technologies said.

Automation and AI Leads the way

Speaking about the role of advanced analytics and AI in driving revenue and growth, Vijayakumar said that the service provider is slowly shifting its focus to AI and currently working on bringing new products that are more AI and automation focused to drive its focus.

“There are a lot of products we’ve acquired and these are being launched in a managed services version. There are other areas like AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning. And, we have the DRYIce (AI-backed automation platform) capability, which is helping us not only in services deals but we are also selling it as a standalone product,” Vijayakumar added.

In its 2017-2018 Mode 1-2-3 Strategy, HCL has further laid down its strategy to regain its infrastructure management services like next-generation data centre and cloud services and workplace services through its autonomics and orchestration platforms.  

Among its solution for autonomics include a robotics process automation and AI/NLP-powered cognitive automation product

Further, it announced its decision to incorporate, DRYiCET, an automation tool for cognitive, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to its various range of workspace solutions in order to make them AI ready.

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The data protection and data management market has grown significantly in the last few months. According to reports, more than $1 billion has been invested in data protection and management in approximately half a year. Recently, Palo Alto-based cloud data management company Rubrik raised $261 million in a Series E funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures along with the existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and IVP. With this funding amount, the company now values more than $1 billion, becoming one of the fastest growing unicorns. Its valuation jumped to $3.3 billion, nearly tripling from the $1.3 billion valuations in 2017. While it may or may not have been profitable yet, the cash it has been generating over the years is enough to fuel its growth till now.

What Is Rubrik?

Founded in 2014 by Indian-origin Bipul Sinha, Soham Mazumdar and Arvind Nithrakashyap, the startup has been making waves as one the fastest-growing data management startups joining the likes of Automation Anywhere, Thoughtspot, Nutanix, Cohesity, which are also led by Indian-origin entrepreneurs.  

The company provides solutions such as data protection and recovery services, analytics on the cloud platform, customised cloud offerings and more. The startup is helping enterprises to bring their static data to life by enabling customers to back up the information digitally. The data management product can work across various clouds and lets businesses see how, where and by whom data is being used. It provides tailor-made solutions and provides a way to retrieve data from storage models in equally fast times.

Rubrik Plan To Utilise The Funding Amount In 4 Ways   

Currently, 1400 people strong, the data management startup plans to use the new funding for corporate purposes, continued future innovation and to support the launch of new products in 2019. The aligns with the company’s goal of working strongly on developing AI and machine learning technology. Below are the areas Rubrik essentially wants to work in:

Tapping Into The Massive Marketing Opportunity: The cloud and data management market is growing fast and the company strongly believes that there is a massive marketing opportunity. The flagship cloud management platform by the company has been doing quite well in the last few years and is entering new markets with the launch of the Polaris software-as-a-service platform and acquisition of Datos IO. With the new funding round, they are trying to build on these and further grow and expand into new markets with a focus on security, compliance and governance. They plan to double down on engineering and marketing with this funding amount.

Corporate Purposes: The company also plans to use the funding amount to expand its go-to-market activities with partners such as Microsoft, Cisco, AWS, Google Cloud and more. It is ambitious to use the recent infusion of capital to meet corporate targets, sustained future innovation, and to support the launch of significant new products, aimed at enterprises being able to use cloud and explore data efficiently.

Support Launch Of New Products And Services: They will use the new capital to speed up the introduction of exciting new products in 2019 that will aim at solving customer challenges and significantly improving and expanding strategic footprint in the enterprises. Sinha shared that they will be building more cloud-first products going forward in areas such as recovery and security. It also plans to bring new products that will help customers move from older legacy systems to hybrid platforms.

Global Expansion: The company, which employs over 1200 people globally and opened 10 offices last year, is looking to expand its global presence. With a global booking run rate approaching $300 million, Rubrik has officially become one of the fastest growing enterprise infrastructure software companies in history and is aiming to grow further.  With huge investments in line, while it might come as an obvious choice for them to do some acquisitions and get into newer market spaces, the company is not immediately planning to do that. “This is not our focus,” Sinha was quoted as saying. “We believe in innovation and are still a young company and want to continue the pace of acceleration.”

Rubrik Funding Wave Brings Good Opportunity For India

The company strongly believes that India is a huge market for them and even flaunts a sizeable research and development workforce in Bengaluru. The innovation centre in Bengaluru opened in 2016 and is headed by Ashish Gupta and has already seen investment to build customer support, software development and sales team in India.

They are also looking to attract the best engineering talent and focus on emerging high-growth areas of software-defined infrastructure and cloud. Currently, they have 100 employees in India, including the best engineering talent.

Rubrik sees opportunity mainly in partnering with Indian system integrators such as HCL for their data management needs and helping India catch up on the current wave of digitisation while they are looking to modernise their IT infrastructure.

Rubrik Is Investor’s Favorite For The Obvious Reasons

Just a few months ago, Rubrik came under scanner for its reported data breach, where it exposed customer data related to major customers, due to a misconfigured AWS Elasticsearch server.

Despite this, their current investor, Bain Capital Ventures believes that Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world.

“When we met Bipul, we were instantly impressed with his vision as well as the skill and tenacity of his team. Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management,” said Enrique Salem, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

Not just customer trust but the fact that Sinha comes from the world of VC helped him study the VC mindset for funding quite efficiently. Being from that background he could look for gaps and subsequent opportunities in the market, and hence ventured into the area of public cloud. The fact that Rubrik could identify the market segments and carve a niche, investors became increasingly interested in them.

It May Prove To Be One Of The Biggest News For The Company

As the company is eyeing an IPO this year, this funding amount may prove to be a good deal for the company. While the huge funding amount provides them with a huge reliability factor, it also gives them an opportunity to tap new markets and opportunities. This funding round has also given the company a chance and resources to challenge established vendors in the space, which will be an interesting thing to wait and watch.

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India has been the biggest contributor to the global IT sector. The sector has increased its contribution to India’s GDP from 1.2% in 1998 to 7.7% in 2017. All the major cities of the country, especially Bengaluru, have been the main centre of IT.

Major companies in the US chose India to set up their workforces. Apart from the IT talent pool that we have in India, location comes as a major advantage. These US companies can have employees working for them 24×7 if they hire people from India, as the time lag fit perfectly. But now, things are changing. More and more companies have started outsourcing their work overseas.

Why Are Indian Companies Higher Overseas?

The Indian IT juggernaut has slowed down due to reasons like business requirements and geopolitical factors. Due to this, many Indian firms find it important to set up many workforces abroad and hire teams for their company with the residents there. There are several reasons revolving around it.

Here are some key, apparent reasons for it:

1.Immigration Issue: Recent dawn of the anti-immigration and anti-outsourcing policy in the US has created a huge pressure on Indian firms to hire the local talent in the US. Speaking of the situation in the US, the political sentiment around outsourcing has changed drastically, the liberal visa norms which made an easy flow of talent from India to client sites has also degraded. Companies, for obvious reasons, do not want to rely on the wavering and unreliable H1-B visa. Many companies are facing lawsuits alleging discrimination in hiring practices, making consciousness regarding issues around diversity. It then becomes important to hire the local people overseas, to not face any loss with the loss of employees.

2.Localisation: This could be associated with the issue of immigration mentioned in the previous point. Business expansion is an important initiative for Indian IT firms to make. In order to understand the business around the place, companies have to go and settle in foreign destinations. An industry like IT experiences success in the technology-rich countries, whether the US or not. It then encourages the firms to hire local talent, instead of Indians. Other outsourcers are expanding their overseas hiring, too. HCL Technologies said that it had hired some 17,000 people in the US and around a third of them are local hires. In 2017, HCL Technologies applied for 640 visas and was granted 400. It has since then focused on the local hires to make weight. TCS had invested $100 million in the US and created some 17,000 jobs in that country between 2011 and 2017. According to a news report, Wipro had localised more than 50% of its talent in the US.

3.Skills like AI and analytics: Fast-bussing and high in demand technical skills related to IT like analysis and artificial intelligence, have a vast talent overseas, especially in the US. Indian companies are in a constant need of these skills and it becomes important to hire them.

4.Demand for local hires: With Indian companies setting up abroad, they also face some conservative customers who demand local talent hire in firms. Last month, Infosys opened its large centre in Hartford, Connecticut, where it plans to hire some 1,000 US workers by 2022. “We will open our next technology and innovation hub at Hartford in Connecticut and hire 1,000 American workers in the state by 2022,” said the IT major in a statement. Tech giant last year opened a 45,000 sq ft centre in Plano, Texas, staffed with 150 people, with plans to ramp up to 2,000 in a couple of years. It has a workforce of over 14,000 employees in the US and 58% of those are locals.

The Aftermath

Because of the hiring of the talents overseas, Indian talent in the sector will face more difficulty in finding jobs in the industry since they will be then entering into a global competition and a broader bunch of talent. Also since the hiring procedure will then be far more specialised and stern, making it more difficult to grab jobs. But as far as the localisation and globalising the market is concerned, the Indian IT sector is doing a job.

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