Mr. Pankaj Balaiga, Vice President of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) confirmed in Karachi today that TCS will be opening up a Center of Excellence in Software Engineering in Pakistan as soon as all the legalities have been completed. Mr. Balaiga made this statement during a meeting with Sindh IT Minister Syed Mustafa Kamal and P@SHA President Ms. Jehan Ara.
The first TCS Center of Excellence will be located in Lahore and will be a joint venture with Techlogix. TCS invests about 4 per cent of its annual revenues in training and, according to Mr. Balaiga, “we see the training and education of our people as a continuous value-adding process”.
This initiative began with the visit to Pakistan in May by TCS Chief Executive Mr. S. Ramadorai and his senior management team. Things have moved at great speed in the past two months during which a great deal of interaction took place between Tata Consulting, the Government of Punjab, P@SHA and prospective partners in Pakistan .
TCS has been continually developing and evolving its intense 8 week program since the 1960′s. Called the Initial Learning Programme (ILP), it is a specially designed training course the objective of which is to transform recruits into software professionals. This program is running at all TCS development centres in India , the US , Hungary , China , etc. It is for the first time that this is being used outside the TCS environment. “The Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) alone is worth millions of dollars,” said Mr. Balaiga.
“Although Tata Consulting is a US$2.4 billion company, we believe that if we are to significantly increase our 0.5% share of the US$700 billion outsourcing business, we have to work with partners in the region to grow their business and ours.”
The focus of the proposed Centre will be to transform graduates into successful IT professionals. It is a 10,000 sq. foot facility which will have a state of the art learning environment for both technical training and soft skills classes, laboratories, library facilities, and a language center. While the core focus of this program will be on technology, the approach will be holistic, resulting in total talent transformation.
“The way to build anything sustainable is to focus on the foundations,” said Jehan Ara. “ TCS’s entry into Pakistan is therefore beginning with a focus on Training. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a long and enduring business relationship.”
“Some people see business entirely as competition and assume they can’t win unless somebody else loses. Other people see business as cooperative teams and partnerships.” said Jehan Ara. “It is in this spirit that P@SHA and NASSCOM have been working together. I am delighted to see it taking root.”
Sindh IT Minister Mustafa Kamal welcomed the initiative and said that his department would seriously look at subsidizing students to take part in the initial training in Lahore . However, he emphasized that there would be so much interest from the young talent available in Karachi that TCS would soon have to look at opening up a centre in Sindh. He offered his government’s support in making that happen.
With partnerships between the Indian and Pakistani IT and ITeS companies beginning to happen, Jehan Ara and Pankaj Balaiga both emphasized the need for a special IT Category multiple-entry, non-reporting visa which would allow for movement of executives, trainers and business people to and from the two countries. “This will be essential for any partnership to succeed,” they said. It is expected that 500 students will go through the 8-week training in the first year and 50 faculty members will be trained during the same period.
