For Atos, India is central in its global expansion roadmap

The company acquired Xerox's ITO business for $1.05 bn further ramping up its presence in India

France-headquartered Atos has been on an acquisition drive as it aims to be a global tier-I IT services provider.

With India being the third largest geography for the company, it will be significant in all the decisions the company takes at global level, said senior management of Atos India.

Atos, a month back, acquired Xerox's ITO business for $1.05 billion which further ramped up its presence in India and almost tripled its revenue from the US. In August last year Atos had acquired Europe-based Bull for 620 million Euros

"With the acquisition of Xerox's ITO business we get its centre in India, Mexico and Philippines. From an offshore delivery perspective Mexico is a new geography for us and now we will have presence there. The company globally has carved out a three year road map for and these are transformation project and we will see some action. Anything group does in the US, India will be impacted," said Milind Kamat, executive VP & CEO, Atos India.

Kamat said that of the 9,000 employees that Xerox's ITO business had almost half are in the offshore centres. Atos has presence in two main segment application development and maintenance and infrastructure management. Kamat said that with Xerox's ITO unit acquisition the infrastructure piece will almost scale up to 6,000 people.

"In the coming two years India scale up will be very high," he added.

Atos like its European competitor Capgemini has been gearing up its presence in the global market as tier-I player. Capgemini took the lead in growing its global presence with the acquisition of Kanbay in 2006. The acquisition allowed them to beef-up its presence in India by creating a strong offshore delivery model and also enhanced its presence in the US financial services segment.

The acquisition will allow the India unit to further scale its initiatives in the US markets that it started a year back.

"As of now we will continue with our plans, as the integration of Xerox's unit will take time. If there is a need for rationalization in the sales and marketing space, that decision will be take in 2016. With this acquisition US will become one of the biggest geographies for us and we will get access to 300-400 clients of Xerox to whom we can sell our services," added Kamat.

Last year in a bid to explore new avenues for growth in the US Atos had initiated a programme called 'India Direct'.

Under this programme Atos India was responsible for identifying new opportunities with a dedicated pool of resources both on the ground as well as its offshore delivery centres to identify opportunities in the areas of emerging technologies such as social, mobility, analytics and cloud, enterprise resources and planning (ERP) and content management.

Since the programme was launched Atos India acquired and added close to around 1,000 odd FTEs from the US market.

Along with focus on penetrating its reach in the US markets, Atos has also initiated a transformational programme for its European client.

"As part of our three tear plan we want to double the application work from Europe to India using our offshore centres. At present we have 8,000 people in application business before end of 2016 the application will touch 13,000," he added.

Atos is a Euro 10 billion company with a total headcount of 86,000 in 66 countries.