India’s $150 billion IT services sector will speed up acquisitions in the United States and recruit more heavily from college campuses, anticipating a protectionist US technology visa program under the Donald Trump administration.
“The world over, there’s a lot of protectionism coming in and push back on immigration. Unfortunately, people are confusing immigration with a high-skilled temporary workforce, because we are really a temporary workforce,” said Pravin Rao, chief operating officer at Infosys, India’s second-largest information technology firm.
“We have to accelerate the hiring of locals if they are available and start recruiting freshers from universities there,” said Infosys’ Rao, noting a shift from the traditional model of recruiting mainly experienced people from the US
“Now we have to get into a model where we will recruit freshers, train them and gradually deploy them, and this will increase our costs,” he added.
Jatin Dalal, Wipro’s chief financial officer, said “ growth strategy is to buy companies that offer something beyond what Wipro already does, or new, disruptive firms – such as Appirio, a US cloud services firm.”
The chief executive of Tech Mahindra, C.P. Gurnani, said “his firm, which two years ago bought network services management firm Lightbridge Communications Corp, is on the look-out for more US acquisitions, particularly in healthcare and fintech – financial technology firms that are disrupting traditional banking services.”
Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka says he has focused on automation and AI as growth drivers since 2014. “The AI platform is 5-6 percent of our revenues,” he told Reuters. “Three years ago, it was zero.”
“The ‘Plan B’ would be to accelerate the trend … to reduce their reliance on people and increase their focus on delivering automation, leveraging the cloud for their clients,” said Partha Iyengar, Gartner’s head of research in India.
By Premji
