TWO Indian cities are emerging to challenge the traditional centres of Bangalore and Hyderabad as the country’s information technology services grow at 20 per cent annually.
Chandigarh – home of India’s first Olympics gold medal winner, Abhinav Bindram – and Coimbatore are fast attracting technology companies and workers as inadequate infrastructure cripples the southern centres of Bangalore and Hyderabad and India’s financial hub, Mumbai.
Chandigarh, in India’s north, was a planned city experiment started by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and is now attracting major IT groups, including Infosys.
It was known as one of the best experiments in urban planning and modern architecture in 20th century India.
Coimatore is at the other end of the country, south of the main southern city of Chennai, and is a traditional textile centre in the state of Tamil Nadu.
In the past few years it has attracted companies such as Wipro and Tata Consulting Services to newly developed technology parks. In a report released 10 days ago, IT consultancy and analyst Gartner named Infosys, Wipro and TCS as the next three “megavendors” that will increasingly take on IBM Global Services Hewlett-Packard-EDS and CSC for major contracts.
“These vendors will increasingly be considered for strategic service deals and will augment, or in some cases replace, today’s acknowledged megavendors in this space,” the Gartner report says.
“Such a shift in the IT service landscape is a key trend that application development and sourcing managers need to understand and prepare for.
Investment bank UBS has named Infosys and smaller firm Satyam as its best bets in the sector.
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