10% of Accenture workforce now Indian

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The year includes the last three quarters of the financial year (September-August) Accenture follows and the first quarter of the next.

This growth in Accenture Services Private Limited (ASPL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of the New York Stock Exchange-listed parent company, was "part of a phenomenal year we had last year at Accenture Limited," the officials said.

Accenture, in its previous avatar as the consulting part of US-based accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, had a handful of staff in India from 1987. But, much of the "phenomenal" ramp up in India and other low-cost information technology and business process outsourcing (BPO) delivery locations has only come in the last 18 months.

ASPL's staff increased from 4,300 at the end of November 2003 to 11,000 at the end of November 2004, says Chaitanya (Chet) Kamat, who heads the company's information technology delivery centres in the country.

The growth makes Indian staff, including management staff hired locally, account for over 10 per cent of Accenture's global workforce of 1,06,000 as on November 30, 2004. And, there is no sign of that trend abating.

If anything, say Kamat and his colleague, Pankaj Vaish, who heads the call centres and other BPO centres in India, the way to look at them is not as a geographical region but as part of five key business areas in which Accenture draws on staff from different parts of the world "" communications and high technology, financial services, government sector, products and resources (such as oil and natural gas).

Indian staff, they say are inextricably integrated with global teams delivering services to large multinational companies in each of these sectors.

Accenture draws on staff in 40 integrated delivery centres in 30 countries, including the US, Canada, Brazil, Central and Eastern Europe, the Philippines and China.

The growth in India also coincides with the period after Accenture was spun off as a separate business in 2001, which did much to shield it from the accounting scandal that hit Arthur Andersen a little later.

During the period 2001 to 2004, in which outsourcing became a mainstream global phenomenon, Accenture Limited actually increased the share of consulting in its total business from 18 per cent 37 per cent, with a corresponding reduction in the share of outsourcing, according to its annual report for 2004.

In the year to August 31, 2004, Accenture earned "revenues before reimbursements (such as travel and out-of-pocket expenses)" of some $13.7 billion, a 16 per cent growth over the previous year.