GCCs in India Now a Value Play for the Parent Organizations: Experts Panellists delved into how GCCs in India have evolved from managing back-office tech operations to becoming an integral part of their parent organizations

Global capability centers (GCCs) in India have evolved from managing back-office tech operations to becoming an integral part of their parent organizations, experts agreed at a panel discussion during the Tech and Innovation Summit organized by Entrepreneur India in Bengaluru.

The panel discussion was moderated by Ayushman Baruah, Regional Bureau Head, Entrepreneur India and the panelists included: Sriram Gopalswamy, Vice President, Site Reliability Engineering, Sabre Bengaluru; Shalini Sankarshana, Managing Director and Country Manager at Planview Inc; Rajesh Puneyani, VP & MD and GCC Site Leader, Kenvue India; and Supratim Ghose, Tech Director, Aurigo.

On the evolution of GCCs, Gopalswamy from Sabre said, "We started off doing QC and implementation kind of work but today we are leading in several technologies that we go and put out for our customers and solving global problems…we are directly facing our customers."

Planview took a very intentional leap of setting up the GCC as a complete microcosm. "The ramp up is done and now we are focused on driving value," said Sankarshana.

At consumer health company Kenvue, it has been a capability play from day one, said Puneyani. "We are a digital and tech enabled center that is transforming the business. We have a team of about 400-500 people and the growth has just started to happen."

Since starting in 2003, at Aurigo, the thought has never been that of a GCC. "It's part of the Aurigo DNA. We are contributing to the full product lifecycle from India," said Ghose.
He added that Aurigo in India has built the flagship product Aurigo Masterworks Cloud. "This is an example of a solution built in India for the world that is used by almost 300 clients across the world."

Puneyani of Kenvue said their end-to-end AI, data science and machine learning solution was built out of India as well as the cloud transformation team.

At Planview, the entire product infrastructure is being run from India. We are also exploring India as a go-to market. For example, we are leveraging some of the core Indian automotive brands' transformation journey and using that to go back and retransform many of the US and European customers' automotive workflows," said Sankarshana.

Asked about the top technologies they are working on, Gopalswamy said, it's on pure operational research while Sankarshana said Planview is disrupting the entire planning business.

"Proactivity, predictability, protection and privacy are the four pillars that all of us are focussing on so our next set of technologies also will be focussed around these pillars and so Gen AI and cyber security will clearly be our focus," said Puneyani.

In the next few years, GCCs will become more of transformational hubs and value creators for parent organizations. The term total cost of ownership (TCO) will be going off and there will be more focus on total value delivery, he added.

Aurigo will be focussing on helping its customers overcome apprehensions on data privacy as well as explore many internet of things (IoT)-enabled infrastructure management offerings, said Ghose.