Indian tech company Infosys to expand operations in NZ

Indian IT giant Infosys Technologies is about to open an office in Wellington.

The company, which has a global workforce of more than 100,000, sees emerging opportunities in providing services in the banking, financial services and telcos.

Infosys has been in Australia for the past seven years and expansion into this market will pit it against incumbents including Gen-i, IBM and EDS.

Infosys' Australasian CEO, Jackie Korhonen said a Wellington office was "imminent" and one could follow in Auckland.

Infosys has between 15 to 20 people working in New Zealand on client sites.

This number will increase in the next few weeks, with staff expected to increase up to 100 this year.

"What we've seen over the last 12 months is demand coming from New Zealand corporations as they look to the transformation of their business."

Infosys was a pioneer of offshore outsourcing with its "Global Delivery Model" and was the first Indian company listed on the Nasdaq.

It offers business and technology consulting, application services, product engineering, custom software development, maintenance, re-engineering, and business process outsourcing.

Korhonen said the company wanted to form partnerships with New Zealand organisations.

"The ideal would be to complement that local expertise and understanding of the market with the scale and skill base that we can bring to bear."

She was in New Zealand last week and said the IT industry still had worker shortages. "Part of the problem [is] there's not just enough of them to get the work done there."

Although Infosys was "cautiously optimistic" there were growth opportunities here, IT spending was also under scrutiny.

"We're seeing our clients being cautious about large-scale capex investments but looking at projects that will quickly give them a good return in cost take-out ."

More firms were opting for models where they avoided spending on new equipment and software licensing, and where Infosys would make the upfront investment and charge through transaction-based pricing. It gave the client a variability so their costs reflected business growth and contraction. Revenues had grown strongly in Australasia during the past year but global head of sales and marketing Subhash Dhar said the company's overall outlook was flat.