HCL Tech to hire 2,000 IBM employees as part of $1.8 bn software deal

Noida-based HCL Technologies plans to take on board nearly 2,000 IBM employees. In December 2018, HCL Tech announced that it would buy eight software products or IPs from IBM at $1.8 billion, making it the single-largest acquisition by any Indian IT firm. The deal, which is expected to be sealed by June, 2019, will give HCL Tech access to over 5,500 clients globally, along with IBM’s 2,000 employees.

With IBM products, we have inherited somewhere around 1,500-2,000 people,” Apparao VV, chief human resources officer, HCL Tech told ET.

The IMB products that HCL will get are:

The products include Appscan, for secure application development; BigFix, for secure device management; Unica, for marketing automation; Commerce, for omni-channel eCommerce; Portal, for digital experience; Notes & Domino, for email and low-code rapid application development, and Connections, for workstream collaboration.

HCL Tech has said the products acquisition would help it reach “thousands of global enterprises”.

The company’s primary focus is on building competencies and not just adding revenues through acquisitions, Apparao said. “We have hired a number of people who are customer experience architects, cloud architects — that kind of profiles. Our acquisitions are selective, to build capability and not (only) to buy revenue,” he said.

HCLT, earlier this month, surpassed Wipro to become the third-largest IT services firm in India in 2018-19, making the first change in the pecking order of the country’s $170-billion IT outsourcing industry in the last seven years.

The IT services firm announced its revenues touched $8.63 billion in the last financial year, a rise of 10 per cent over the previous financial year.

In constant currency terms, the rise was 11.8 per cent.

IBM sacks employees to ‘reinventing’ itself

The tech giant sacked 300 employees from its services division in India, according to media reports.

The company responded to the reports, saying, it is “re-inventing” itself to meet changing requirements of the businesses.

“IBM has been in India for over 25 years and remains committed to being an essential part of its growth.

“IBM’s strategy is to re-invent itself to better meet the changing requirements of our business and to pioneer new high value technologies,” the company said in a statement. Most of the “sacked” employees were in the software services.