Business

Accenture plans permanent unit in Chennai

By K. T. Jagannathan

CHENNAI, FEB. 3. Accenture, which is currently working from an incubation centre, will move to a permanent facility in Chennai in six months. The Chennai centre has 500 people.

In an interaction with the presspersons here today, Chaitanya Kamat, Head, India Delivery Centre Network, said Accenture had four delivery centres, Chennai being the latest.

He reckoned that outsourcing in India was not just about pricing. "It has got to do more with things that were not done in the past," he added.

In his view, customers went by the delivery capability and not bothered about where the service was provided. He said Accenture focussed only on the high-end business. That partly explained why it had not grown the way the other Indian companies had done in the BPO space.

He suggested that Accenture competed only in the big-ticket deals, which involved players like IBM. "All our centres in India are doing high-end and complex outsourcing jobs," he pointed out.

To a question if India could be an `in thing' in the BPO business, he merely said India had the talent pool and insisted that delivery capability would be an essential requisite.

Accenture has more than doubled its manpower in India in a year. For the year ended November 2004, the headcount had increased to around 11,000 from 4,300 a year ago. India's manpower forms roughly about 10 per cent of 100,000 employees that Accenture has globally, according to Mr Pankaj Vaish, India BPO Lead, Accenture. They were not willing to hazard any guess on the job additions in India, in general, and Chennai, in particular.

"We see India as a strategic location for us due to availability of rich talent," Mr. Vaish said. The Indian delivery centres provide a variety of services such as application development and maintenance and offers BPO capabilities such as call centre, human resources, finance and administration functions.

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