India for the world – The GCC way
This includes value creation through service expansion, architecting futuristic solutions at scale, strategic decision-making, and driving operational efficiencies
- Jul 20, 2024,
- Updated Jul 20, 2024 4:14 PM IST
India will continue to be at the heart of the GCC growth momentum, delivering considerable impact across economic, human capital, innovation, social, and environmental dimensions of the country. GCCs are well positioned to play a prominent role in their organizations’ growth and success.
This includes value creation through service expansion, architecting futuristic solutions at scale, strategic decision-making, and driving operational efficiencies. Talent will remain the underpinning force driving this growth. Encouraged by the performance of their current GCC presence in India, existing corporates will certainly look at expanding their operations while the number of new entrants is likely to grow.
India’s technology industry is propelling the country’s overall economic growth, with its revenue surpassing USD 200 billion in FY22 and projected to reach USD 500 billion by 2030, as per a NASSCOM report. Within this growth story, GCCs are playing a key role. Industry reports estimate them to account for ~20% of this potential revenue by 2030.
Talent is one of the key cornerstones of this GCC growth. India is amongst the top producers of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates every year, with approximately 1.5 million engineering students graduating annually. Powered by this talent pool, GCCs are naturally poised to drive the enterprise agenda, redefining their relationship with the parent organization. The innovation and research taking place across India, empowers the leadership here to take product ownership, and strategic roles.
Therefore, senior leadership positions that lead global teams, are increasingly being based in India. This is further projected to increase to nearly 20K by 2030, of which 30% are expected to be women. To nurture and develop this multi-generational and diversified talent, GCCs are increasingly investing in their employee value proposition, with a focus on culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and learning and development opportunities. These teams, though geographically distributed, are fostered as one team, with shared DNA, culture, and values.
Contemporarily, GCCs are driving and leading organization-wide transformation initiatives, creating technology breakthroughs, and developing new business lines and products, across functions and industries such as banking and financial services, software, telecom, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, healthcare, and pharma. This is a big step up from entering the foray as cost and labor arbitrage centers for back-office support and customer service.
Today, GCCs are a salient extension of the front to end business model of the enterprise, completely aligned in terms of culture, values and business objectives. This shift to ‘offshored insourcing’ leverages the value of executing business with controllable SLA, reduced risks, quality benchmarks, ready access to in-house tools, resources and existing systems, innovation stewardship, and skilled talent.
Augmenting this value accretive model, GCCs are setting up centers of excellence (COEs) to drive end-to-end product development with innovation, extending services to functions such as legal, marketing and procurement, and are increasingly focusing on engineering, research, and development (ER&D) capabilities.
While these set-ups continue to be concentrated across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi NCR, the GCC penetration is now growing to tier-II and III cities such as Visakhapatnam, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Indore, and others. This is owing to their improving infrastructure, favorable state policies, lower real estate costs, skill diversity, start-ups presence and governmental initiatives such as smart cities, tech parks, and incubation centers.
Furthermore, 11-15 percent of the tech talent is based in these emerging hubs. They produce 60 percent of India’s overall graduates who benefit by the presence of high-quality educational infrastructure, including engineering, arts, and science colleges and the strong engineering research and development (ER&D) ecosystem.
GCCs are also delivering diversified and significant returns in terms of GDP, taxation, and employment at scale. As per industry estimates, GCCs have a significant multiplier impact – 3X on revenue (generating a total of 3 dollars for the economy, for every dollar spent), and a 5X multiplier impact on jobs.
India has emerged as the GCC capital of the world with over 50% of GCCs setting up house in India. These numbers become more significant when we extrapolate to see this includes 25% of the Fortune 500 companies. The positive upward trajectory of the GCC growth story is expected to continue in the future redefining and strengthening the relationship between GCCs and their headquarters.
Views expressed are personal. Uma Ratnam Krishnan is the Managing Director of Optum India
India will continue to be at the heart of the GCC growth momentum, delivering considerable impact across economic, human capital, innovation, social, and environmental dimensions of the country. GCCs are well positioned to play a prominent role in their organizations’ growth and success.
This includes value creation through service expansion, architecting futuristic solutions at scale, strategic decision-making, and driving operational efficiencies. Talent will remain the underpinning force driving this growth. Encouraged by the performance of their current GCC presence in India, existing corporates will certainly look at expanding their operations while the number of new entrants is likely to grow.
India’s technology industry is propelling the country’s overall economic growth, with its revenue surpassing USD 200 billion in FY22 and projected to reach USD 500 billion by 2030, as per a NASSCOM report. Within this growth story, GCCs are playing a key role. Industry reports estimate them to account for ~20% of this potential revenue by 2030.
Talent is one of the key cornerstones of this GCC growth. India is amongst the top producers of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates every year, with approximately 1.5 million engineering students graduating annually. Powered by this talent pool, GCCs are naturally poised to drive the enterprise agenda, redefining their relationship with the parent organization. The innovation and research taking place across India, empowers the leadership here to take product ownership, and strategic roles.
Therefore, senior leadership positions that lead global teams, are increasingly being based in India. This is further projected to increase to nearly 20K by 2030, of which 30% are expected to be women. To nurture and develop this multi-generational and diversified talent, GCCs are increasingly investing in their employee value proposition, with a focus on culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and learning and development opportunities. These teams, though geographically distributed, are fostered as one team, with shared DNA, culture, and values.
Contemporarily, GCCs are driving and leading organization-wide transformation initiatives, creating technology breakthroughs, and developing new business lines and products, across functions and industries such as banking and financial services, software, telecom, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas, healthcare, and pharma. This is a big step up from entering the foray as cost and labor arbitrage centers for back-office support and customer service.
Today, GCCs are a salient extension of the front to end business model of the enterprise, completely aligned in terms of culture, values and business objectives. This shift to ‘offshored insourcing’ leverages the value of executing business with controllable SLA, reduced risks, quality benchmarks, ready access to in-house tools, resources and existing systems, innovation stewardship, and skilled talent.
Augmenting this value accretive model, GCCs are setting up centers of excellence (COEs) to drive end-to-end product development with innovation, extending services to functions such as legal, marketing and procurement, and are increasingly focusing on engineering, research, and development (ER&D) capabilities.
While these set-ups continue to be concentrated across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, and Delhi NCR, the GCC penetration is now growing to tier-II and III cities such as Visakhapatnam, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Kochi, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Indore, and others. This is owing to their improving infrastructure, favorable state policies, lower real estate costs, skill diversity, start-ups presence and governmental initiatives such as smart cities, tech parks, and incubation centers.
Furthermore, 11-15 percent of the tech talent is based in these emerging hubs. They produce 60 percent of India’s overall graduates who benefit by the presence of high-quality educational infrastructure, including engineering, arts, and science colleges and the strong engineering research and development (ER&D) ecosystem.
GCCs are also delivering diversified and significant returns in terms of GDP, taxation, and employment at scale. As per industry estimates, GCCs have a significant multiplier impact – 3X on revenue (generating a total of 3 dollars for the economy, for every dollar spent), and a 5X multiplier impact on jobs.
India has emerged as the GCC capital of the world with over 50% of GCCs setting up house in India. These numbers become more significant when we extrapolate to see this includes 25% of the Fortune 500 companies. The positive upward trajectory of the GCC growth story is expected to continue in the future redefining and strengthening the relationship between GCCs and their headquarters.
Views expressed are personal. Uma Ratnam Krishnan is the Managing Director of Optum India