BENGALURU: Karnataka, which is already home to over 875 Global Capability Centres (GCCs), aims to attract more centres including talent in coming years.
On Wednesday at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Karnataka IT Minister Priyank Kharge said through the GCC Policy, “We aim to ensure Karnataka remains top destination for GCCs to thrive and innovate.” On Tuesday, the government released its GCC policy, which aims to set up 500 new GCCs by 2029.
India has over 2,975 GCC units and the GCC market size is over $64 billion, of which Karnataka contributes 34%. At a session on Making Bengaluru the GCC HQ of the World, experts stressed on the need to prepare a road map to move towards next phase of growth and strategies for sustaining leadership in the sector.
Bhaskar Verma, regional director, Nasscom, said of the country’s $254 billion technology industry, 64 billion dollars business is generated by GCCs, and it employs 1.9 million people directly. Milesh J, VP, head of strategy and operations, at SAP Labs India, said GCCs are no longer supporting backend functions and that they have evolved into value creators and driving innovation.
“We started in 1998 with 100 employees and now we have 16,000 employees. We started off with localisation of ERP (enterprise resource planning) solutions for the Asia Pacific market and we took a conscious call not to run as offshore centre …we wanted to integrate our India development centre into four global hubs.”
Andrea Zimmerman, SVP and president of Target in India, said investing in leadership is important. Experts say Indian GCCs need to work on filing AI patents.
“We are building our own foundational model and India is playing a major role in it,” said Milesh. The GCC policy points out that by 2030, state could be home to 330 of the Forbes 2000 enterprises. Talking about the policy, Srividya Kannan, founder and CEO of Avaali Solutions, said this policy represents a major step in fostering economic transformation, but its success will lie in its ability to evolve with the dynamic needs of businesses and technology.