From pure-play engineering we're now end-to-end: Roche India's Raja Jamalamadaka

And the centre is generating innovation across three buckets, the GCC head says: Incremental, a lab automation room for example, adjacent, such as work that generates patents and third, even disruptive innovation.

Team members from the Pune site have been part of global teams that have filed five patents and developed six algorithms so far, according to the note. 

In addition to the main Pune site, the India GCC has two satellite centres in Hyderabad and Chennai with about 70 employees each. An additional 200 or so contract staff are also expected to be converted to full-time employees as vacancies open up.

Of the four teams represented within the India GCC today, Roche Information Solutions builds customer or consumer-facing products. Roche Informatics, which was started in 2023, builds products that are used within Roche’s organisation, including in areas such as finance and HR, and other tools and solutions that support the customer-facing team, helping it build the external products.

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A third team is part of product development focussed on diabetes. The fourth is Diagnostics Solutions, which works on related hardware. The satellite teams in Hyderabad and Chennai provide shared services, or global business services, to the parent organisation. They offer analytics and automation for the internal ‘value chain’ of the company.

“So having started with pure-play engineering, today we are end-to-end,” Jamalamadaka says. “And we play a powerful role in ‘platformising’ some of our products.”

Typically, these platforms play a role in automating various recurring tasks. A good example would be one that’s helping Roche to pull together data from multiple sources, cleaning and anonymising it and preparing it in a manner that allows business applications built on top to get the appropriate data.

“This gene pool shows this trend,” for example, he says.

And what’s noteworthy is that all the stakeholders such as the product owners, the ‘scrum masters’, the agile coaches, developers, testers, and so on “we have all of them co-located to be able to make product decisions right here in India”, the GCC head says.

“We can empower the team to take decisions and impact the course of the product. That’s what makes us a true innovation centre,” he adds.

Over the course of his close-to-30 years in the industry, Jamalamadaka has helped build two other GCCs before Roche’s India centre, and he is also currently on the boards of directors and works as a mentor to other GCCs in India.

With an eye to the future, GCCs that want to evolve as strong centres of innovation will find leaders that aren’t necessarily domain experts, but are expert at bringing together a diverse set of people who can collectively deliver path-breaking work, he says.

And he sees the ecosystem in India deepening on this front, with organisations such as Roche’s India centre expanding and strengthening their industry partnerships.