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"Finding talent in India is becoming harder"

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CIOL Bureau
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LAS VEGAS: Yogesh Gupta, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Computer Associates is responsible for defining the strategy and direction of the company's software solutions.

Under his leadership, the office of the CTO manages technology and research initiatives, cultivating CA's growing intellectual property portfolio, much of which is protected by US and international patents. In an interview to E Abraham Mathew of Dataquest in Las Vegas, Gupta, who has been pivotal to the successful evolution of CA as the world's leading provider of eBusiness management, dwells on several management issues, emerging trends and plans for product development in India.



On CA's plans for product development in India:



We have grown our development organization in India very dramatically in the last year and we will continue to grow it. I don't whether people realize it or not. CA has always had development centers worldwide. We have these centers in the US, UK, Germany, India, Israel and Australia. We believe that India offers us a great opportunity. What India offers us from a technology perspective is to grow the development environment and the development resources while not growing development expenditure.

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On why India is a strategic choice:



As in any company, some people leave CA every year and the turnover is usually middle single digits. When that happens you can hire more number of people in India as a replacement for a person in the US. If five people leave in the US, you could probably hire two in the US and five in India or maybe ten. So we will grow our development organization in India and we will grow the amount of work that we do there and the amount of results that we will be able to deliver to our customers just through organic growth.

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On the JV model for its development centers in India:



We did that initially because we were not sure how successful we would be on our own. It isn't just technology. To run a development center in India it requires a whole lot of things around it and we felt that a joint venture might be the right thing to do. Plus we felt that the joint venture could do work for more than just CA. Actually the original plan was not just do development for CA. Unfortunately that is what they focused on which was a reason that they did not grow as much as they could have. We saw this opportunity to become a development center for tech companies and other IT organizations as well.

On India as a tech support center for worldwide operations:



That continues to be an area of focus for us. I know that there are companies like Dell making a lot of noise about moving out of India. We believe that we can do worldwide support out of India and we have been doing it for a bunch of products. The goal is not to move support from point A to point B. The goal is that when we need to grow something the growth can be done in a place which is cost efficient and where we can find talent easily.
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On hiring in India:



One of the challenges that I see in India is that finding talent is becoming harder and harder. Everybody's resume looks good but when you actually talk to them they are fairly shallow resumes. For example, in CA, we hire less than one in twenty people that we interview. So that tells you that there is a lot of stuff that comes by that is not the quality that we are looking for. The talent level in India has to continue to stay high. And the second challenge is that there is a tendency in India for people to switch jobs every nine to twelve months. To me that is not a useful quality and I have told people that you have all the right credentials but I am not going to hire you because your records show that you switch jobs every year or so. What that means is that I am going to spend the next six months training you and then you give me three to six months of productivity and then you are going to be gone. I am sorry but that is not good for business.

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On the recent management changes:



I think, we have always been a company that embraces change. Charles Wang left CA in 2000 and then Sanjay Kumar came on board and focused on customers and you see the benefits of that today. Now we are entering an era where we want to continue the customer focus. We are going to continue to innovate and solve our customer's problems. In business, if you do not change you do not survive. And in our business, this is yet another challenge and I am looking forward to it.

For the full interview log onto dqindia.com

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