Capgemini eyes IT services market

European consulting major Capgemini is bracing for a major play in the domestic information technology services market in India.

The French company, which reported $13.5 billion in revenues in 2011, is pitching for transformational projects in India, backed by its consulting capabilities that have been Capgemini's forte globally, according to Salil Parekh, a top executive.

The Paris-headquartered entity is now planning to introduce some of its globally-successful technology services in India, says Parekh, Capgemini's CEO (application services business) for North America, UK and Asia Pacific), and also heading its global financial services. Given the company's understanding of the requirements of the Indian customers, the 1967-founded Capgemini has identified energy and utility, financial services and telecom as the major focus areas.

"We started the India business about three years ago; thus we are at quite an early stage of business in India," recalls Parekh, also a member of the Group's executive committee.

"So, we are focusing on a few areas where we can bring in our global expertise."

Capgemini, much like most global IT majors such as IBM and Accenture, uses its offshore delivery centres in India to mostly service its global clients.

The company has about 36,000 employees across its various centres in India, which makes up around 37 per cent of its global employee base.

However, Capgemini, which began its operations in India in 1998 for offering consulting services, started selling IT services only around 2008.

Within just over three years, Capgemini counts about 70 Indian clients, including companies and organisations such as Indian Railways, Mother Diary, Asian Paints, Maharashtra Sales Tax, GMDC and Tata Power.

"The demand for technology services in India will continue to grow at a very

fast pace for many years," says Parekh. "This is something from which we need to be benefiting."

The company also says the India business grew at a healthy pace of 70 per cent in 2011, said to be the fastest for the company in any geography.

However, it is still a very small part of its overall revenues, although the company does not share the revenue figures from India.

Parekh notes Capgemini, despite being in India for a number of years, did not initially wish to play a bigger role in the IT services space.

Reason: lack of scale.  "In the initial years, we worked in the oil, retail and telco sectors in India, mainly for consulting works," he notes.

"We did not compete for IT-related works, as we did not scale up our IT business initially to that level.

"Now, it is expanding more because we can do large technology transformation works."

According to Parekh, the company is planning to focus on specialised services like smart grid and smart metering, taxation, insurance and claims, and new platforms for telecom services players.

Capgemini is talking to a couple of states in North India to implement smart grid and smart metering solutions.

It is already doing work in this area in countries like Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and some parts of the US.

This would help cut transmission and distribution losses of the electricity-distributing companies by about 40 per cent, thus improving the efficiency, according to Parekh.

Recently, Capgemini bagged a contract from the Maharashtra sales tax department to implement business intelligence and data warehouse solution.

"We work with many governments in the world to help them with their tax system," informs Parekh.

"Globally, we work with HMRC, UK. We also work with governments in the Netherlands, France and Australia for the offering.

"The company is bringing in the same expertise to India. We will work at the national, as well as the state level."