TCS, Infosys and Wipro bet big on non-linear growth

It's become the 'holy grail' that every top Indian tech firm is chasing and talking about. After over a decade of growing their More Infotech Stories Performance of top IT cos in Q1 India's top 10 BPOsThe rise of multinational IT in India Key facts on India's IT industry revenues at 20-30% every year, TCS, Infosys and Wipro are scrambling to arrest their linear, people-led growth by exploring different ways to ensure that they do not have to hire more in order to serve additional customers, and handle higher volumes of projects.

Together, the country's top three tech firms already employ over 3,00,000 staff between them, and pursuing non-linear growth is on top of their agenda. For Wipro, India's third biggest software exporter, the non-linear journey started some two years ago in an abandoned computer making unit, owned by the company's hardware division at Mysore, which has now evolved as its global services management centre. The centre caters to over 85 customers with around 1,000 staff.

While rivals TCS and Infosys are also pursuing non-linearity as part of their long term agenda, experts say Wipro may have done better in arresting people-led growth by pursuing an 'on demand hiring' strategy.

"To some extent, only Wipro has tried to break the one-to-one correlation between revenue growth and employee addition as it so demonstrated through FY09 – an effort initiated before the crisis intensified in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers,” said Edelweiss analysts Viju George, Kunal Sangoi and Pratik Gandhi.