As U.S. election looms, India IT seeks image makeover

BANGALORE: As the U.S. presidential election ramps up the rhetoric against offshoring jobs, India's flagship software services providers are seeking an image makeover. For Wipro, Infosys and others, multi-billion dollar outsourcing giants with U.S.-listed shares, the challenge is to be seen less as a cheap Bangalore dump for U.S. companies shipping work overseas, and more as responsible firms creating jobs and investing in America's future. "If young people in America look at us as a career opportunity, we have succeeded," T V Mohandas Pai said six years ago when he was a board member at Infosys. Today, India's $100 billion IT and business process outsourcing ( BPO) industry says it directly employs 107,000 people in the United States, close to a third of whom are Americans, a figure that has doubled in five years. The industry's makeover takes on a new urgency ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November where jobs will be a crunch issue. President Barack Obama has sharpened his criticism of U.S. firms 'exporting' jobs, seeking to tax them more and use that money to help those that keep jobs at home. "I'm responsible for transforming the organisation into one having a look and feel of a U.S. corporation ... changing Infosys in USA to Infosys USA," Padmanabhan Rao, who heads the company's U.S. operations, writes as his LinkedIn profile. It's increasingly a business reality. The outsourcing industry, championed by India but spreading to other Asian centres such as the Philippines, expects to hit $225 billion in annual revenues by 2020 - an unrealistic target without strong growth in the United States, the biggest market. Infosys has 15,000 employees in the United States, including those with shorter-term work permits, and will have hired another 1,200 locals in the past year. North American clients generate close to two-thirds of global revenue. Infosys employs more than 145,000 people worldwide. Rao told Reuters the goal for Infosys is to double local recruitment, and that may happen as early as the next fiscal year. Part of his job, Rao says, is "to get Infosys to think global, but act local." Indian outsource firms are "willing to step up and do things a little bit different to show their investment in the U.S. economy," said Helen Huntley, a vice president at Gartner Inc, noting the tone of political debate has grown harsher in line with greater economic uncertainty. "That's political motivation as well as motivation for clients ... (who want to see) feet on the street," she said. By setting up shop in the United States, Indian outsourcers could win more business from smaller U.S. customers under pressure in an election year to hire and outsource locally. "It plays naturally to Indian providers who want to show a presence in the U.S.," said Huntley. The Indian firms are increasingly looking to transfer staff from their clients on to their own books to secure orders. This also helps as a public relations tool to raise their profile as local job creators, Huntley noted, and can qualify for certain state incentives. When Tata Consultancy Services opened a centre in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2009, the state governor attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony. "The Indian companies are very engaged" in getting local political support, noted Huntley. TCS, India's No.1 software services exporter, last month opened a technology centre in Santa Clara, California to serve as global headquarters for its mobile computing work. CAMPUS RECRUITMENT Wipro, which began after the Second World War as a sunflower oil producer and moved into India's fledgling IT sector in the early 1980s, also wants to boost its overseas, or ex-India, workforce. Chairman Azim Premji wants as much as half his total staffing to be local, in the United States and elsewhere, and he holds up the firm's Atlanta, Georgia centre as an example of how Wipro has successfully recruited local talent. "That's our goal for the next 2-3 years and I think it's completely do-able ... even if I have to thrust it from the top," Premji said in January after Wipro reported a 10 percent increase in quarterly profit. Wipro employs some 10,000 people in the United States, Chief Marketing Officer Rajan Kohli said in response to an e-mailed request, adding Atlanta is a "strategic development centre", with U.S. citizens making up 80 percent of its 675 staff. Wipro's global workforce tops 120,000. "We're driving diversity in our hiring by consciously inducting local talent, military veterans and campus recruits," Kohli said, and expects to replicate the Atlanta model in at least two other U.S. cities.