5G launch in India might be a distant dream for tech freaks in India but not for French IT giant Capgemini. The company is already busy working out a critical strategy to build a team in India that can serve the next wave of demand for skills in technologies like 5G and edge computing.
As more global technology is already experimenting to co-develop cases surrounding the technology. The company’s India unit looks to position itself as a hub for such projects and has also been skilling Indian executives in this direction.
Capgemini in India, CEO, Ashwin Yardi, in recent interaction said that from autonomous cloud to cars, increasingly more products and services are becoming embedded with software and that Capgemini has been capitalising on this trend through its ‘intelligent industry’ offering, which includes work on a cloud, Artificial Intelligence, Intern of Things (IoT) solutions, edge computing and 5G, which are technology areas that have a big footprint in India for the company.
“Some of the biggest use cases of 5G will be on the shop floor of plants. More companies will start looking at these use cases and it will be a sort of next wave of demand for skills in India. That’s why our whole focus is on 5G, edge (computing) and intelligent industry,” Yardi said.
Capgemini recently announced plans to launch a 5G lab in Mumbai towards the same where companies can prototype and test their 5G projects. This is the third such lab following two in Portugal and France. The technology has become a key focus area for Capgemini following its acquisition of French engineering-consulting firm Altran last year, now rechristened Capgemini Engineering.
“5G is one of the key focus areas for Capgemini group globally, and especially with the acquisition of Altran, which has a big footprint in telecom technologies… It (5G lab) is a 1,500 square feet lab with all the 5G testbeds,” Yardi said.
While in the last year companies were forced to digitalise and modernise their technology infrastructure after the onset of the pandemic, in the last few months, they are focussing on ramping up their digital capabilities strategically.
The company that faced a bump in the growth plans to ramp up hiring in India as part of business expansion. Earlier in 2020, the company announced to hire 30,000 people for different roles in India. The company hired about 25,000 people in 2020.
