Bumper year for city in IT hiring

Bumper year for city in IT hiring
Mini Joseph Tejaswi | TNN

Bangalore: The calendar 2007 has been a bumper year with the Indian IT/ITeS industry recruiting around 5 lakh employees, against 3.5 lakh in the previous calendar and 2.5 lakh people in 2005. Interestingly, Bangalore has captured almost 50% of this cumulative hiring numbers with IT and ITeS segments taking equal share at 50:50.
Active hirers have been TCS with a net addition of 30,000, Infosys Technologies with 27,000, Wipro 25,000, IBM 22,000, Cognizant 17,000, HCL Technologies 14,000, Satyam Computers 12,000, Accenture 10,000, CapGemini-Kanbay combine 5,000 and EDS 3,000.
“Clearly year 2007 has seen people scale across verticals, be it services, products, semicon, telecom, datacom, gaming and entertainment, automotive and aviation and KPO,” said B S Murthy, CEO, HumanCapital, a firm that analyses the talent market. The unprecedented boom witnessed by industries like banking, insurance, retail, realty, aviation, hospitality and healthcare during the year has had tremendous impact on the growth of tech sector.
“This has significantly increased the size of domestic IT market with every conventional business going in for tech solutions and software packages. Also, a large number of tech firms have expanded their foot print to tier II and tier III cities across the country thereby significantly ramping up the people-front,” said Nirupama VG, AdAstra Consultants.
Annual tech salary increments too have seen a sudden spurt, in the range of 20% to 30% during this year, with India becoming “the paymaster” across all the emerging geographies. During calendar 2006, the increments were in the range of 13% to 15%.
During the calendar, Mysore, Bangalore’s logical extension, emerged as a notable tech IT player. Its tech force doubled to over 20,000 with Infosys, Wipro, L&T Infotech and Target taking the lead. To top it all, year 2007 has seen TCS, the country’s largest IT firm, becoming the largest tech employer in the country with 1.1 lakh employees. Waiting in the wings to cross this one lakh people mark early next year are Infosys, now at 89,000, Wipro 85,000 and IBM with 65,000 people.
With tech spaces including product, R&D, media, mobile application, hardware, remote infrastructure management are becoming extremely active, the number game is expected to continue through the coming year as well, said Pravin Tatavarti, MD, Allegis India, staffing outfit.