How service providers and GCCs are building valuable partnerships

Till about two years ago, global capability centres (GCCs) were seen as competing with IT and tech services companies. That’s now history. Both are seeing enormous value in each other, and they are experimenting with a variety of models of engagement.

“GCCs and service providers are going to coexist in this world because there is enough and more work for both,” Deepak Wadhawan, SVP of operations & India country leader for Concentrix, said during a fireside chat at our GCC conference in Hyderabad last week. Concentrix is a technology and services company with 450,000 employees around the world.

For new GCCs, it’s an unexplored territory, and services companies can help them quickly establish themselves, thanks to their years of experience with hiring talent and setting up infrastructure and associated services. “The scale we provide in terms of talent acquisition is unmatched. At an average, in the peak season, we hire about 5,000 to 6,000 people a month,” Wadhawan noted, adding that with work they do generally becoming increasingly complex, their ability to provide specialised talent at the most optimal costs has also grown.

Ajit Melarkode, SVP of sales & account management for Asia-Pacific at Concentrix, said their ability to provide foundational services to GCCs, including those like data governance, analytics practice, and managed security services, is very high, especially given how much they do all of this internally. “The Americans call it eating your own dog food – we have internal managed security services for the half a million people in our company,” he said.

Ecosystem play, testing prototypesFor older GCCs too, the talent play of services companies is useful, especially when they need certain kinds of talent for short periods of time when they are, say, conducting new experiments. Melarkode noted that many GCCs start as one function, but then go on to multi-functions and then think of the ecosystem. Here again, service providers can play a significant role. “In the case of one of our European banking clients, their GCC told us to deal with their ecosystem of legal representatives for customer queries and claims processing,” he said.

Wadhawan said when GCCs establish R&D centres in India, one of the things they want service providers to do is to take the prototypes and see whether they are working as expected. “In two clients, one in retail and the other in transportation, we co-locate with them, and as soon as they develop a solution, we test the prototypes – using our experience and processes – and we provide almost real-time feedback,” he said.