Comments

The number took us even in India by surprise

for a long time GE (before it spun off Genpact) had the largest number of employees in India by an MNC (18,000) less than 2 years ago.

From where did IBM hire these additional 30,000 people??

Posted by Gautam at June 6, 2006 10:20 AM

and to obscure the obvious an IBM exec said as part of Sam Palmisano's visit to India this week

"We are not in India for lower costs, but to take advantage of the talent in the country to do the high-end things that IBM does elsewhere in the world,"

Of course, you want better talent but quit pretending you will not get the former.

Not for lower costs? sure the Pope is not Catholic, either

Posted by viinnie mirchandani at June 6, 2006 11:03 AM

Oh btw our friend @ infosys could carefully look at this trend.. Corporate Entites are making bold steps into this segment.. will it mean that strategic long term alliances will put the squeze onto Indian based formed/ corporations ??

Afterall, growth is the oxygen of Business.. so if the growth imperative is being met and exceeded by these new entities, then the flip side it there organic demise of others will occur too -- correct ?? wrong ?? comments :)-

Posted by /pd at June 6, 2006 7:49 PM

As a Gartner analyst, I used to discount staff numbers every outsourcing firm provided. As a negotiation consultant now, I find it fascinating that in spite of all these big staff counts, when you push for specific resumes, they magically all end up as busy. From a client's perspective the 20, 30 , 100 it needs are far more important than the 20,000, 40,000 whatever firms brag about... PD to your point , India, China in particular are no where near talent saturation point if you are willing to recruit from secondary schools,train them etc - so it is not yet a zero sum game.

Posted by vinnie mirchandani at June 7, 2006 12:10 AM

....and out of those 43K noble beings, how many of them actually "WORK"???

Posted by K.Sriram at June 7, 2006 12:41 AM

Vinnie, the flip side is that MNC's can walk into the India/China (which they already doing) and "recruit from secondary schools,train them etc".

Would this not mean that the Indian Based orgs like TCS, Wipro be accutely aware of the risk paradigm from competetion (IBM, CISCO, GYM) ??

Posted by /pd at June 7, 2006 6:07 PM

PD - it should - but United had United Shuttle for a while and folded it. Delta had its Shuttle and now Song and folded them both. GM had small cars for a while and gladly went back to SUVs and big cars. Tough to change DNA. As I help CIOs negotiate the IBMs and Accentures still want to charge Western rates. So just hiring employees in India/China by itself will not make them competitive. IBM was in India back in 1977. Accenture acquired a sizable Filipino firm in late 80s. NASA and Motorola weere the first 2 CMM level 5 sites in the world - we just have not taken it to the next level...

Read my note Detroit Redux below ...

http://techspend.com/blog/2006/05/25/detroit-redux/#

Posted by vinnie mirchandani at June 7, 2006 11:10 PM

Ahhh.. you steered the conversation from talent channels into Pricing Channels !! ITs common sense business wisdom that sez pricing and pricing eleascity is important for revenue line items.

Let me rephase the question at play. Will TCS/WIPRO and Infosys be the main technologys players by 2020 ??

BTW--CMM works fine for industrial strength type of development works.. but IT folios are moving so into web2.o'ish apps that Cmm has no relevance

Posted by /pd at June 8, 2006 10:43 AM

PD - my answer lies in the US airline and auto industires. A decade ago if you had told me Southwest would have 10% market share and be the price leader I would have laughed. 20 years if you had told me Japanese automakers would have 40% market share in the US I would have laughed. The franchise is theirs for IBM, EDS etc to retain or lose. As an Anmerican I hope they do, but they appear headed like Delta and GM. They enjoy deal succeses but the secular trend is not healthy. I see too many CIOs who cannot wait to reneogiate their deals.

Will Infosys or Wipro or TCS be the next Southwest or Toyota? 2 years ago I would have said likely - now I worry about their ability to handle hyper growth. Southwest actively manages growth to 7-8% a year when it could grow at 20%. The Indian firms are just not that disciplined.

Posted by vinnie mirchandani at June 9, 2006 8:48 PM