Capgemini headcount soars

Capgemini's Australian operations are tracking to ramp up sales by 65 per cent this half on the last one, which has led to the company increasing its Australian-based headcount by 150 since the half year began.

Capgemini's new exec
Deepak Nangia
(Credit: Satyam)

75 of the increased headcount came from the company's acquisition of Nu Solutions last September, but the other half has come from organic growth. The company now has around 534 people in Australia. It also has around 250 employees working in India to support Australian clients.

"We've gone tremendously well this year," Capgemini CEO Paul Thorley told ZDNet.com.au.

The company has been trying to escape the image that it is purely a technology consultancy competing with the likes of KPMG. Its true competitors are the IBM's and Accentures of the world, Thorley said, since outsourcing and technology services were a large part of its portfolio.

Currently, the global percentage sits at around 70 per cent outsourcing and technology services and 30 per cent consulting. Having this sort of focus helps escape the "feast and famine" type model which Capgemini has suffered under in the past, Thorley said.

Despite there being many suppliers in the outsourcing and technology services market, Capgemini was succeeding by finding its own niche, according to the company's managing director new business, Deepak Nangia, who decided to move to Capgemini from Mahindra Satyam instead of becoming acquainted with the disgraced Indian outsourcer's new global management.

For instance, Capgemini has had some success in the financial services market with specific products such as credit card processing, wealth management and anti-money laundering products. "We've focused ourselves and looked at the market and said we're going to bring you expertise in certain areas," he said.

Capgemini's niche wasn't just in specifics, but also in deal size, Thorley said. He believed that if a company had a $50 to $100 million outsourcing deal as opposed to a $100 million to $400 million deal, it would think twice about giving it to IBM. "You don't want to be the twentieth largest customer for IBM," he said. He thought customers would rather be a more important customer of Capgemini.

Nangia pointed out that there had been a lot of industry consolidation, such as HP buying EDS, which meant there were less service providers that were not hooked up to particular products. "There are very few organisations which are true blue service organisations," he said. This could lead to favouritism he said. "It's easy for an organisation to discount one part of the business," he said. Despite this, he believed that Capgemini's independence was its ace.

Thorley thought the financial services would see the biggest growth in the new year, followed by the consumer products sector, the Federal Government and telcos.