ICRA projects modest growth for Indian IT, GCCs push demand for tech professionals

ICRA projects Indian IT industry growth for FY24 at 3-5%

Despite expectations of a slowdown in growth momentum, ICRA maintains its stable outlook on the Indian IT services industry led by a well-established business position, expectation of healthy earnings and cash flow generation, and strong balance sheets of the industry players.

Commenting on the near-term expectations of industry performance, Deepak Jotwani, Assistant Vice President and Sector Head, ICRA, said, “ICRA expects a moderate revenue growth of 3-5% in US dollar terms (for its sample set) in FY2024, lower than ~9.2% YoY growth in FY2023 owing to persistent uncertainty in the key markets, resulting in pauses and deferral of non-critical projects and slowdown in discretionary IT spends by key sectors like BFSI, retail, technology and communication.”

Indian IT services companies witnessed a sharp moderation in growth momentum over Q3 FY2023—Q1 FY2024 owing to the evolving macroeconomic headwinds in key markets of the US and Europe. In Q1 FY2024, ICRA’s sample set recorded a revenue growth of ~3.8% on a YoY basis in US dollar terms, the lowest in the last 10 quarters. In terms of geography-wise trends, the growth in the US witnessed a sharp moderation compared to that in Europe.

GCCs driving demand for tech professionals, says Quess Corp

Quess Corp, India’s leading business solutions provider, today launched ‘The Skills Report’, offering insights into the technology skills enabling the future of work in India.

The demand for talent with tech skills such as development, SAP, automotive design, testing, and infra support, among others, has seen a surge in the first quarter of FY24, according to the report. Upskilling across industries has been a strategy adopted by companies over the last year to bridge the emerging skill gap in India, it noted.

Among functional skill suites with the highest intent-to-hire in Q1FY24, development roles (28%) held the highest share. Demand for developers skilled in over 65 technical proficiencies and platforms was noted. Interestingly, full-stack skills exhibited consistent and upwardly trending demand within the consulting, automotive, banking, and telecom sectors. The demand for SAP (16%) expertise has consistently remained high, encompassing both development and implementation aspects.

As per Quess, a surge in demand for these proficiencies was particularly high within the consulting and GCC client domains.

“Amid macroeconomic headwinds affecting the US and Europe, the IT services sector faces a downward hiring trend of 25-30%. However, this situation has opened up new opportunities, with GCCs ramping up talent acquisition and projecting an estimated employee strength of 1.4 million, hiring is likely to increase by 10%,” said Vijay Sivaram, CEO, Quess-IT Staffing said.

Tech Mahindra partners with Google for GenAI solution

Tech Mahindra has partnered with Google to launch generative AI-powered Email amplifAIer under its TechM amplifAI suite of AI offerings. Email amplifAIer aims to serve as a one-stop solution to manage all email communication of the contact centre for enhanced customer service.

Tech Mahindra’s Email amplifAIer aims to provide end-to-end solutions for email automation and personalised responses by identifying the intents, extracting the required entities from the email, and other systems including applications for CRM and finance. The solution looks at driving significant improvement in agent productivity and turnaround time, creating consistent and accurate responses and having lesser human dependency, according to the company.

The newly launched solution with Generative AI capabilities is designed with a human in loop principle. With this, the users can review generated responses and make changes before sending them to customers, if required.

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UST acquires MobileComm

UST, a global IT solutions company, has acquired MobileComm, a US-headquartered telecom engineering firm for an undisclosed value. This acquisition will bring over 1,300 employees and is expected to strengthen UST’s telecommunications practice.

MobileComm was founded in 2002 and operates across the US, India, and Canada, and offers capabilities in wireless engineering.

UST said the acquisition will enable it to merge its experience in cloud and devsecops with MobileComm’s wireless engineering capabilities, providing offerings for Communications Service Provider (CSP) customers. Furthermore, UST can bring industry-curated 5G (Private Cellular) use cases, providing new monetization opportunities to CSPs.

GlobalLogic opens tech centre in Nagpur

GlobalLogic, a digital engineering company and part of Hitachi Group, has announced the expansion of its experience design and digital engineering footprint in India with the inauguration of a new state-of-the-art Center of Excellence (CoE) in Nagpur.

According to the company, the CoE will play a pivotal role for GlobalLogic’s global clientele in accelerating their digital transformation journey by integrating experience design and complex engineering to scale new possibilities and transition into tomorrow's digital businesses.

The CoE has a seating capacity of over 500 and will cater to global markets which include North America, Europe, Japan, APAC, and the Middle East, spanning numerous industries such as telecom, medtech, automotive, media, and edtech.

Cisco partners with Nutanix for multi-cloud deployments

Cisco, the global networking company, and Nutanix, a hybrid multi-cloud computing company, have announced a strategic partnership to accelerate hybrid multi-cloud deployments by offering a hyper-converged solution for IT modernisation and business transformation.

According to both these companies, IT organisations continue to face significant operational hurdles and urgent sustainability and security concerns as a result of increasing multi-cloud complexity. This partnership aims to simplify and accelerate the delivery of infrastructure and applications at a global scale through best-in-class cloud operating models, flexibility, and automated resiliency with customer support.

The new offering integrates Cisco's SaaS-managed compute and networking infrastructure (Cisco Unified Computing System with Cisco Intersight) with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Unified Storage, and Nutanix Desktop Services) and will be sold by Cisco using its extensive go-to-market reach.