As GCCs mature, Tier II and III locations will become attractive

Given the opportunity to stay closer to their families and extended communities, with better quality of life than in increasingly congested, polluted and expensive cities, more Indian techies are happy to stay on in or even return to locations such as Nagpur, Indore, Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Mysuru, Madurai or Coimbatore.

Also read: Indian GCCs and the talent landscape

A combination of improving infrastructure such as better connectivity—both physical and digital—and encouraging government policies at both the central and state government level is also helping to slowly drive investments into the smaller cities. Gujarat has put forth a plan to support the growth of the semiconductor industry. In Madhya Pradesh, an IT, ITES and ESDM promotion policy was released in 2023. In Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, GCC-specific policies have been rolled out to attract investments beyond Chennai and Bengaluru, respectively.

Some examples of large multinational companies with centres beyond the metros include Baxter International, in pharmaceuticals, Kraft Heinz, in FMCG, Moody’s Analytics, in professional services research and consulting, Schlumberger in energy exploration, Schneider Electric in industrial equipment, Mastercard in financial services, and Electrobit Automotive and Bosch in automotive, according to the consultancy Zinnov in Bengaluru.

At Zinnia, which provides a tech platform to some of the largest insurers in the world, CTO Pawan Choudhary expects to include the so-called ‘Tier II’ locations in his hiring plans. In addition to its larger centres in Bengaluru and Noida, Zinnia has employees in Nagpur, where some 120 staff have moved into a brand new building, and in Coimbatore, where the company’s invested in fully re-doing and upgrading the interiors of an existing office.

A team in Nagpur specialises in a “smart CRM” (customer resource management) solution for the insurance sector, and one in Coimbatore is working on third-party underwriting, Choudhary says.

In looking to go beyond the big cities, “there’s tremendous potential in all these places. Next time I’m in India, I’m going to be looking at expanding to a couple of more centres if we can,” says Ketan Karkhanis, CEO of ThoughtSpot, a US-based search and AI-based business analytics platform provider.

ThoughtSpot, which has its biggest centre in Bengaluru and another in Hyderabad, also has a small centre in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala. “Much of our front-end development at this point happens from there”, says country Head and VP of Engineering Kumar Gaurav.

He explains: If one takes a quick look at the company’s eponymous product, its core value proposition is, how can it help a user search structured data, and the insights that can support decisions and actions. “So, visualisation creates a powerful story on this entire piece.”

Experts like Gaurav call it ‘charting’. It needs to be instantaneous—fast loading and efficient. And how useful the chart will be for the end user hinges on ground-up innovation, and ThoughtSpot has its charting libraries as well, he says. “Many of these things are powered by our engineers in Thiruvananthapuram,” he adds. 

“We are going to be thoughtful about what I call these creation spaces,” Karkhanis adds.