The decision to operate consulting within TCS as part of a global practice unit and not a legally separate entity appears to challenge the notion that TCS will need to make vast changes organizationally and culturally if it plans to compete inside the high-value consulting market.
Surya Kant, president of TCS America, emphasizes the need for keeping the firm's Global Consulting Practices (GCP) as part of the whole.
"The GCP is a unit within TCS, and you really don't want to disconnect the two. Customers will tell us that they want to see these together. They like the integration. They like to know that the execution will not be disconnected," says Kant.
Asked whether bureaucracy within TCS would likely undermine the firm's ascension into more sophisticated consulting services, Kant replies: "Consulting firms in general dislike bureaucracy, and this is something — at the rate that we are growing — that the TCS culture does not have."
TCS recruited nearly 1,000 professionals during every month in 2005. The TCS America workforce currently includes approximately 500 local hires, or 5 percent of the geography's workforce. The firm says that it's now looking to grow that to 1,000, or 10 percent, by the end of 2006.
Meanwhile, the firm continues to build relationships with America's institutions of higher learning. Currently, TCS America has R&D relationships with the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee and the University of California– Riverside (both since 2000); Carnegie Mellon (since 2002); MIT and Georgia Tech (both since 2004); and Stanford (started in 2006).
"Some of the people who are doing research within these relationships are also taking sabbaticals and working at some of our R&D centers in India, so it's a relationship that is broadening for both of the parties," says Kant, who believes that interest in TCS's R&D capabilities will continue to attract talent from different learning institutions.
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