Deloitte Consulting plans to double its employee strength in India to 2,000 within the next 18 months to grow its offshore business.
Though there is no plan to increase the number of centres in India (it currently has two), the staff strength in these locations would be ramped up. “We are ramping up our capabilities in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Our focus will be in the broad areas of technology integration, enterprise application and customer relationship management” said Deloitte Consulting global director of offshore development Raj Joshi.
At present, the company has an employee strength of 1,000. Hyderabad is a bigger centre, accounting for a 700-member staff. The balance is from Mumbai. While in Hyderabad, Deloitte runs its operations on its own, in Mumbai it has formed a joint venture with Mastek called Deloitte Consulting Offshore Technolo-gy Group. The Hyderabad centre does business process outsourcing and IT outsourcing. In Mumbai, the company is only into IT outsourcing.
The company services 50 clients from India. The offshore capability in Mumbai is for 30 clients. Hyderabad services 20 clients. For each of these 50 clients, there is an onsite team. Mr Joshi did not disclose the name of the clients, but said that they were all Fortune 100 companies.
The drive this year, Mr Joshi said, would be to get bigger contracts and be engaged in multiple projects. Deloitte Consulting has already moved many of its internal operations for outsourcing from India. This includes data management, hosting of websites and applications. “Our primary intent, though, is for clients. We see value proposition in the offshore India model,” he said.
The last 12 months have seen a downward pressure on billing rates but this has been more on the maintenance side rather than on high-value projects, he said. However, the billing rates have bottomed out. “We do projects rather than maintenance. The bottom line for clients is to give a value proposition. Within Deloitte, India is the fastest growing region for us,” he added.
