Bangalore: Consulting and technology giant Accenture houses around a third of its employees in India. Speaking exclusively to TOI on a visit to Bangalore on Tuesday, Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme described India as the heart of Accenture and said the company's employee base in India would be 70,000 by August this year, the highest in any one country. The US has the second largest employee number at around 30,000. Accenture globally has 215,000 people.
The $22-billion Accenture's strength in India shows yet again how critical the country has become to the world's technology giants. IBM does not reveal country figures, but is said to be the second biggest IT employer in India, after TCS. Capgemini has a third of its employee base in India, higher than in its home country France.
"The quality of engineers in India is spectacular. In the West, with an ageing population, there is a significant shortage of people with skills in maths, science and engineering," Nanterme said.
He said India is now at the heart of Accenture's global operations in technology, innovation and industry expertise. India is at the forefront of the company's R&D and innovation in several key industry drivers including cloud computing, analytics and mobility. "We are making huge investments in India to develop our expertise around the new waves of technology that will drive future business," he said.
Nanterme said that the company now focuses on hiring engineers who have deep domain expertise in specific sectors. This enables engineers to understand how a certain technology or application can support functions in specific sectors. It also enables engineers to develop industry specific solutions on top of the existing platforms.
For instance, Accenture has built a banking centre of excellence in India where the company is developing pre-configured solutions for banking customers. Similarly the company has established centres of excellence in around ten key industry verticals.
Asked what he thought of Indian IT companies like Infosys and Wipro, he said they were good companies and Accenture had learned much from them. "One of the things we learnt (from them) was to have 70,000 people in India; and to stay close to them to understand them better," he said. He said it with a laugh, but it did not look like he said it tongue-in-cheek.
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