Government welcomes Tata IT plan
The education system that the government was struggling to transform did not generate enough of the right skills, and Tata had to be applauded for its commitment to help, Deputy Communications Minister Roy Padayachie said.
Speaking at the launch of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) last week, Padayachie said Tata had seen SA’s lack of hi-tech skills and undertaken to assist in developing indigenous talent.
“The South African government is fully behind this group and its ability and willingness to contribute to the development of our people,” he said. “The government has a responsibility to take its people out of poverty and thinks this partnership will help that.”
Tata would also help SA’s companies to acquire the experience needed to succeed globally, he said. SA had produced companies with the potential to go global, but they lacked the experience to show what they could do on the world stage and create global brands. “We are not going to do that on our own,” Padayachie said.
TCS has been operating in SA since 1995, initially using local company Conscripti as its sales partner. Conscripti was 40% owned by Dimension Data, and when Didata increased its holding to 80% in 1998, Tata bought the remaining 20%.
Didata Africa’s CEO, Allan Cawood, said Tata had wanted to go solo for the past two years, but it had taken a while to work out how best to relax the ties between them. Tata has now bought the business out from Didata for an undisclosed amount.
Cawood said some staff would swap around between the two entities, but they would continue to work together.
When the deal with Conscripti was first forged, Didata described it as a way to alleviate SA’s skills shortage by giving it the ability to import Indian skills. As TCS launches as an independent company, little has improved.
“There is a huge skills shortage in SA,” said TCS chief operating officer Natarajan Chandrasekaran. “We want to serve SA by building capacities here. We can bring people in from other parts of the world, but that’s not sustainable.”
TCS CEO Subramanian Ramadorai said its new role as a solo entity would let it contribute more to the economy by using its development programmes that had trained technicians around the world. “We definitely plan to recruit local software professionals from colleges and universities.”
TCS would also work with black companies to fulfil some contracts and would train staff for its customers so they could maintain the technologies being installed.
As its business in each country matured, it had to get closer to its customers and capitalise on its intellectual property by setting up a formal structure of its own, said Ramadorai. “The time is right to do the same in SA.”
TCS is the largest IT services organisation in Asia, with revenue of $4bn and 100000 staff.
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