Indian offshore firm plans 1,000-employee development center in Atlanta
posted in Outsourcing News and Top Outsourcing deals, Outsourcing to India |Source:www.computerworld.com
One of India’s largest IT services firms, Wipro Ltd., is in the advance stages of finalizing a plan to build a software center in Atlanta that is expected to accommodate up to 1,000 employees over the next three years. It’s the first of four centers planned for the U.S.
Although Bangalore, India-based Wipro has 6,000 employees in North America — part of a workforce of more than 72,300 — they are spread among some 90 locations and provide sales and support.
Atlanta was selected because of its labor force and proximity to technical schools, said Sridhar Ramasubbu, Wipro’s chief financial officer for the Americas and Europe. The center will be used for application development and maintenance, infrastructure support, and some research and development. The center is expected to be operating in about three months.
Locations in other states have not been finalized, he said.
Ramasubbu said the Atlanta facility will meet the needs of customers who want some of their work to remain in the U.S. and help the company mitigate some of the restrictions it faces because of a federally mandated cap on H-1B visas. India’s high-tech trade group, the National Association of Software and Service Companies in Delhi, has asked the U.S. to increase the cap and called the visa limits a trade issue.
Wipro, as with other Indian offshore firms, is diversifying its development locations by opening facilities worldwide, including offices in China, Vietnam, the Philippines, eastern Europe, Romania and Latin America.
Wipro now has three centers in China, although they have relatively small staffs. Ramasubbu said the country’s labor pool doesn’t have experience yet to support large IT service operations. He expects that situation to change in the next several years, and as a result, Wipro’s China facilities are being used to help it understand that country’s human resources needs. “We have to have some sort of presence there, but we are not ramping up very heavily in China,” he said.
The company this week reported a 16% earnings gain for the quarter that ended June 30, a gain that might have been higher had it not been for the value of the rupee, which has increased some 9% this year, said Ramasubbu. Net income for the quarter was $175 million on revenue of $1.03 billion, an increase of 34% from the year-ago quarter.
Although the Indian firms are growing, Stephanie Moore, an analyst at Forrester Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the market is beginning to shift in other ways.
In surveys of 1,800 Forrester clients over the past year, the research firm is seeing concerns from customers about larger Indian firms, Moore said. In particular, some of the flexibility that these customers saw early on is beginning to disappear as Indian companies begin to operate more and more like U.S. vendors, becoming rigid and focused on the most profitable customers.
The Indian vendors that “used to be the best alternative to folks like IBM and Accenture are now beginning to behave much more like them,” she said.
This is benefiting smaller Indian firms, Moore said, which are seeing more work as a result.
