PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Global Reach
Besides Cisco, Autodesk, AMD, and VM Ware, other leading
Bay Area clients and partners include BEA Systems, KLA-Tencor,
Spansion, Juniper Networks, and the Franklin-Templeton Group.
In December 2008, HCL acquired Axon, a UK-based leading provider
of implementation and support services for SAP enterprise
software. The combined entity is now the largest SAP implementation
firm in the world, further adding critical mass and additional
customers in the U.S. Also in 2008, HCL broke ground on a 500-
seat data center in North Carolina. Starting with clients from the
defense and aerospace sectors, it will eventually serve clients from
all of HCL’s key verticals.
Speaking in his office in Noida, general manager for marketing
Krishnan Chaterjee lays out an ambitious goal to have 50% of the
company’s services three years from now coming in service areas
not being offered today. He points out that to reach that goal, the
company must accelerate the shift from low-end services (wage
arbitrage) to high-end IT consulting. In the end, he says, the
“value-volume strategy” of just hiring more people to ramp up
value (the old Indian model) will fail, requiring a strategic shift
from customer/vendor relationships with clients toward
collaboration and partnerships.
While “Silicon Valley and Bay Area companies have always been
the pioneers in coming up with new models of engagement and
are the first to go out and try new technologies,” Kishore says, “the
center of gravity has been shifting—it used to be in the 408 area
code, but now it’s in Finland or Bangalore. Constant innovation is
the only way to keep going.”
In 2007, HCL announced plans to open five new technology centers
across India employing 100,000 professionals over the next
5–7 years. The first, which opened in Noida the same year, will
employ 15,000 professionals focused on home entertainment, media,
publishing and content delivery technologies. Following the
strategy to develop specialized capability in select industry verticals,
the next two centers, in Bangalore and Chennai, will focus on
financial services and life sciences, respectively. With a global
workforce of 57,000, HCL Technologies earned $1.8 billion in fiscal
2007-08, 56% of that in the U.S. where it employs more than 3,000
people across 21 offices in 15 U.S. states. Its U.S. headquarters in
Sunnyvale has a staff of about 450.
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