The Hindu Business Line : Now IT's the battle of headcount

AS competition in IT offshore space intensifies, foreign players including IBM, Accenture and CSC appear unwilling to be left behind in the number game and are scaling-up their India headcount on a war-footing to challenge the proven offshore might of Indian IT services companies.

While bellwether Indian firms such as Infosys and HCL Technologies' added 26,012 employees, and 17,627 employees respectively between 2001-02 and 2004-05 for IT services business, leading global IT services companies - IBM and CSC added close to 17,000 and 1,500 employees, respectively, between 2002 and 2004.

Accenture, which had 4,300 professionals on its India rolls in December 2003 employed about 16,000 in India centres by August 2005 - majority of them in IT services and BPO segment and some in consulting.

"We currently have 24,000 people in India, China and the Philippines and see that number growing to about 50,000 over the next 3 years, based on client demand... Our strategy is to defend and extend our position in the marketplace by going after applications maintenance and development work that will allow us to take greater advantage of labour arbitrage and cross-sell additional services," Mr Chet Kamat, Head - India Delivery Center Network, Accenture, said.

CSC, too, plans to have management and physical infrastructure ability to scale to at least 10,000-12,000 employees by the end of the company's fiscal 2007 - a substantial increase considering that it had about 750 employees less than three years back.

Since then, the strength of the company in India has been rising steadily, from 1,350 employees at the end of 2003 to 2,250 by end of 2004. It has 4,200 employees in the country at present.

Mr Tom Kenyon, Managing Director of CSC India, feels that the company today offers multiple advantages compared to its Indian counterparts. "While the Indian camp did win business from ABN, CSC has been winning deals of that size and much larger for almost 15 years.

"We can also bring large-scale full end-to-end services - management consulting, system integration, application management and outsourcing and infrastructure services to our clients.''

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