Indian offshoring giant Infosys boosting U.S. hiring

Computerworld - Infosys Technologies says it will hire 1,000 U.S. workers to increase its ability to provide consulting and management services to its clients, an area of increasing importance for the India-based offshoring giant.

Infosys on Friday reported $1.5 billion in revenue for the quarter, an increase of nearly 30% from the same quarter last year. North America accounts for nearly 66% of its revenue.

Ashok Vemuri, SVP and global head of banking and capital markets, said that most of the growth is from existing clients, although it added 13 new accounts in the American market in the most recent quarter, including two Fortune 500 firms.

Vemuri said businesses have a backlog of projects and are now making "a release of dollars, if you will," to move the projects ahead.

But Vemuri told Computerworld that the company's revenue gains were related to customer acceptance of its increasing capabilities beyond application support and maintenance to management consulting, process and project management and product development.

The company has somewhere in the range of 14,000 to 15,000 workers in the U.S., but it does not break out the number of workers in this total by either citizens and permanent residents or those on a temporary work visa. Infosys is one of the largest users of H-1B visas.

Infosys operates on a model whereby roughly 30% of the client services are delivered on-site and the balance offshore. The goal of hiring 1,000 U.S. workers was set at the start of the fiscal year in April.

Specifically, the company is seeking people with architectural skills, as well as program managers, those with experience in large application migrations, cloud development and product development, said Vemuri.

Infosys employs about 122,500 worldwide. It increased its workforce by 7,650 employers in the most revenue quarter.

Offshore firms may have to increase U.S. hiring if Congress approves a so-called 50-50 rule, which would limit the number of workers on H-1B or L-1 visas to half of a firm's total U.S. head count.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at  @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com.

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