Benches back in vogue; courtesy, Digital

MUMBAI, INDIA: Digital is big and the top five have pledged millions of dollars in investments to tap the massive opportunities in this space.

Courtesy Digital, benches which had silently been shown the door by the ITeS major in India, are back! The services companies are investing millions to train employees across digital platforms to serve global customers. They are setting up benches for in-house experts!

Compare this with the situation about a year or two ago. The ITeS companies fired employees on the bench or forced them to put in their papers in a bid to save operational costs. Instead, they pay hefty fees to external consultants. The trend is reverse once more, and in-house experts and focus on training and development is in vogue.

“If you look at the results for the last few quarters, you will see payments to third-party consultants have been increasing. Companies have acknowledged that they cannot control this cost until they have the talent in-house," an analyst with a Mumbai-based brokerage firm told a business daily.

Take for instance Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is also increasing its hiring target to 75,000 for the year, and hoped to exceed its goal of training 100,000 employees on digital technologies in FY2016.

Anant Gupta, CEO, HCL Technologies, stated, "The shift we are trying to see is from services being consumed or being bought as competency-based capability (time and material) and maybe fast forward 3-5 years it will move to outcome. So, we (are looking to) move from capability to output and outcome."

Similarly, the third biggest ITeS company Wipro. TK Kurien, CEO candidly admitted in a communiqué to the Bombay Stock Exchange that the company is developing a bench, and is planning to train 10,000 individual for Digital, while announcing the company’s quarterly results recently.

According to a report in Economic Times, the move has come after the companies saw an increase in third party payments for the training of employees. TCS observed a rise of 15 percent year-over-year in the fees paid to external consultants. Infosys too had noticed an amplification of 55 percent year-over-year in its payments to the technical sub-contractors.