Indian GICs to play active role in biz growth: Study

Hyderabad: With India emerging as a major hub for Global In-house Centers (GICs) for large organisations, most of whom are willing to spend a chunk of their IT budgets on growing businesses,

Indian GICs

are slated to play a more active role in the business growth of these companies in the coming days, said a report by Nasscom and Bain & Company that was released at the Nasscom GIC 2017 conference here. GICs are offshore centers that perform designated functions for large organizations.

“Approximately 70% of CXOs surveyed believe that the Indian GICs will play a more active role, and approximately 50% of enterprises already have, or expect to have, leaders two levels below CEO positions based out of their Indian GICs. These CXOs anticipate the scale and scope of work managed by GICs to increase along with the enterprise’s reliance on the GIC while also fundamentally expecting GICs to continue to deliver cost productivity,” the report said. . The findings of the report, titled ‘Global In-House Centers in India -- Get ready for the future’, are based on the results of a survey of 30 CXOs of Fortune 1,000 companies and 80 Indian GIC leaders.

The CXOs surveyed highlighted the fact that Indian GICs will have to focus on six key areas in the coming days -- analytics, traditional IT, digital-age IT, domain expertise, leadership and cost savings. “While GIC leaders are mostly aligned on these priorities, traditional IT stands out as something that GIC leaders aren’t prioritizing as much as global CXOs demand. GICs must excel at digital-age IT capabilities, but parallelly they also need to continue to focus on reducing the cost of traditional IT to help CXOs fund growth initiatives. GICs also need to help make traditional IT ready for digital initiatives,” the report added. Nasscom’s president R Chandrashekhar pointed out that India, which is home to 45% of GICs, sees a new GIC being opened every two weeks. There are currently about 1,100 GICs employing over 8 lakh people in India.