New Delhi: IT company Infogain has said that global businesses even amid uncertainty are prioritising digitisation and customer experience to gain an edge in the market, and it is looking to hire 1,000-plus people in FY24, as it steers ahead with growth strategy.
The Silicon Valley-headquartered digital platform and software engineering services company is also actively scouting for acquisitions, Dayapatra Nevatia, President and Chief Operating Officer of Infogain told PTI.
Apax Funds portfolio company, Infogain, has offices in California, Washington, Texas, the UK, and Singapore, with delivery centers in Seattle, Houston, Montevideo, Kraków, Noida, Bengaluru, Pune, Gurgaon, and Mumbai.
Nevatia said that the company will continue to steer ahead with its three-year growth and business blueprint, which it finalised last year.
Nevatia ruled out any layoffs and asserted that the company will in fact hire 1,000-plus people in the current financial year, over 800 of them in India.
Infogain's global headcount currently stands at 6,000 and almost 5,000 of them are in India.
On the market sentiments and tech spendings, Nevatia said there is some "softness" in the market but was quick to add that businesses have realised the importance of digitisation during COVID and digital transformation for most companies is now a necessity.
Given the focus on digital transformation, customers continue to spend, and not cut back, although in some cases, they may want more work in the same amount or demand sharper business cases.
"A quarter back there was a huge amount of uncertainty, but now I think the risk of things falling off the cliff is not there. Of course, the uncertainty continues. Customers, however, continue to spend money on digital transformation and so the impact is minimal," he said.
Infogain's order book is healthy and the pipeline strong, he asserted.
"There is softness, yes, but temporary. We continue to remain excited about long-term prospects and make investments... before you realise, the pull back will happen (market recovery) and the investments will allow us to respond quickly," he said.
India expansion will continue. Apart from the existing centres, the company is evaluating 2-3 more centres which will act as satellite locations. It is evaluating Tier 2 cities in India and a decision will be taken by the end of the Q2 FY24.
"We are evaluating 2-3 more centers, which will act more as a satellite center for us. When people come back to the office, we all know it is going to be hybrid and therefore we need to make sure we provide more options to our employees," he explained.
Infogain engineers business outcomes for Fortune 500 companies and digital natives in the technology, healthcare, insurance, travel, telecom, and retail/CPG industries.
It aims to accelerate experience-led transformation in the delivery of digital platforms using technologies such as cloud, microservices, automation, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence.
Infogain is a multi-cloud specialist across hyperscale cloud providers – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.
Nevatia said the company is also actively looking for acquisitions, to deepen capabilities.
"...This year we will be a lot more aggressive... It could be India or the US. Our focus is primarily on capability on the experience side or to strengthen our data analytics or digitisation or AI capabilities...
"So, in areas which we already have capabilities or we offer solutions to customers, in those areas we want to further strengthen, either in terms of IT products that are used to build the solution or the horizontal capabilities," he said.
Past acquisitions of Infogain include Silicus Technologies, a Houston-headquartered Microsoft Gold Partner and Microsoft Azure Expert MSP (in 2019), as well as Absolutdata, a San Francisco Bay Area-based AI and Advanced Analytics company serving Global 500 clients (in 2020), among others.
In 2021, Infogain, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Nggawe Nirman Technologies (NNT), a cloud-native app development company servicing customers in the manufacturing, fintech, edtech, healthcare, and software industries.