Melbourne, Australia-based telecom major Telstra is setting up a captive offshore center within India’s information technology consulting company, Infosys, Telstra’s largest technology vendor in the country. Pareekh Jain, research vice-president (engineering services) at Massachusetts-based HfS Research says, “We cannot call this a trend yet, but we’re observing that many companies are getting or planning to get their work back in-house.”
Global in-house centers, or captives, operate in India across all service lines — IT services, BPM, engineering services, and product development. The country has about 1,050 captives which contribute 22% of India’s $108-billion software and business process management exports, while employing 790,000 professionals. ‘These are playing a diversified role for global enterprises and are viewed as cost centers, centers of excellence, program management offices and an innovation hotbed for emerging markets,” industry body NASSCOM said.
Analysts say that global firms are struggling in their shift to adapt newer technologies and business models and look at working on smaller models in closed units before they implement across organizations, reports Business Standard.
Jain added, “Customers are facing tremendous disruption in their core industries with the new-age companies and would like to have some technology capability in-house, especially in newer areas such as digital, which can help them navigate digital disruption. India is becoming a hotspot for talent in newer technologies for the same reason the country was popular for traditional IT services.”
