Accenture

At Accenture, we were privileged to meet with their Managing Director of BPO, Delivery Center, Mr. Pankaj Vaish. Similar to what we saw from Cisco and other multi-national companies who have opened locations in India, Accenture strategically brought over many of their core top leadership from the U.S. in order to ensure that Accenture's corporate culture was ingrained in the new organization.


Unbelievably, Accenture has experienced purely organic growth in headcount - that is, growth that is not acquisition-based. Accenture India grew from just 100 employees in 2000 to over 35,000 employees in 2007. In fact, Accenture India has the most headcount of any office in the world for Accenture. This staggering number of employees was reinforced to us by the multiple floors of cafeteria and U.S. mall-like food courts we walked through to get to the conference room where we were hosted.


Accenture was the first international consulting firm to open in India, and is currently focusing on managing and optimizing their clients' networks, without ownership of their networks. Accenture India recently handled the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines. Mr. Vaish discussed that Accenture's talent strategy is highly centered around specialization of skills, as their clients are beginning to demand more risk from Accenture - asking that they not just bill time, but more importantly to deliver extraordinary results in highly specialized and senior outsourced roles.

In addition to the presentations by Mr. Vaish and several of his esteemed collegues, we were given impressive demonstrations by various Accenture specialists on R&D projects focused on human health diagnostics, network diagnostics, and videoconferencing that highlighted the advanced and specialized skillsets available at Accenture India.


-- Eileen McSweeney