Accenture achieved a rare feat in India last year: it became the first major non-Indian IT services firm to employ more people in India than in any other geography including the US. With this, Accenture completed the first leg of its global delivery journey, which it had audaciously started less than a decade ago.

The Bermuda-headquartered company decided early in the game that the best way to take advantage of Indias talented labor pool without diluting its deep customer engagement model was to grow organicallyat least not to acquire only for scale. While it has built significant advantage over many of its rivals in IT, where Accenture has really taken an almost unbeatable lead, is in offering high value BPO services like clinical data management services for pharma majors such as Wyeth and Eisai.

It has significant customer services offering in India, handling clients such as AT&T/Bellsouth and Telstra. The other services it provides out of India are FAO, where it serves clients such as BT and Microsoft; and procurement, where it serves clients like First Horizon. For many clients, Accenture provides multiple services across the IT and BPO sectors.

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l Year of Start-up: 1987 l Address: 4/1 IBC Knowledge Park, Bannerghata Road, Bangalore-560079 l Tel: +91-80-41060000 l Fax: Tel:+91-80-41060000 l Website: Accenture.com/India
Highlights n Opened a management consulting center in Gurgaon n Opened with Bristol-Myers pharmaceutical industrys first joint center for pharmacovigilancemonitoring of safety data to ensure optimal use of medicines. n CEO William Green visited India in April Strengths p Deep customer relationships p Really integrated global delivery p High value BPO services out of India Weaknesses q Rupee appreciation and H1B cap could become serious bottlenecks q Consulting yet to mature q Despite CMC, domestic growth disappointing		Harsh Manglik, chairman & MD Sandeep Arora, Technology Delivery PG Raghuraman, BPO Delivery Prithvi Shergill, HR Sadeesh Raghavan, India Domestic Business Rekha Menon, Geographic Services Sanjay Jain, Management Consulting

In IT, Accenture provides ADM, infrastructure management, and IT consulting/systems integration from India. But unlike Indian firms, its services portfolio does not include engineering services and outsourced software product development. Its acquisition of two companies AddVal Technology and Coliant also added to its India delivery capability.

With 37,000 people on board, Accentures early strategy of hiring more laterals has changed. Today, close to half of its recruits come from campusesmore than 85 of them across India. It plans to reach 50,000 in terms of headcount by August 2009.

While Accentures global delivery out of India is maturingwith the company beginning to sell offshore programs separately out of Indiait has not been able to match rivals like IBM and HP in the Indian domestic IT services market, despite early success like Dabur and Indo Rama. Last year saw the company giving serious thrust to the India business and a few deals are expected this year.

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