Buenos Aires-based Globant plans to hire techies to increase presence in India

After the wave of gloom that recently hit the Indian IT sector, thanks to the reported mass layoffs, things finally seem to be looking up. Buenos Aires-based IT giant Globant has said that it plans to increase its presence in India and hire more people globally.

Globant is Argentina's largest IT brand and has been in India since 2016 when it acquired Clarice Technologies in a deal valued at about Rs 120 crore ($20 million). In the months that Globant has been in India, it has increased its workforce to about 500 and intends to add about 700 more people.

Speaking about the firm's decision to set foot in India, Martin Migoya, CEO, told the Economic Times: "When we saw Indian IT firms doing well, we said there was no reason this couldn't be done out of Latin America."

Migoya also opened up about increasing its presence in India and said: "India is important for us. Once this expansion is complete, it would form about 20% of our total employee base. Our leaders here will help propel global growth,"

Globant hiring techies comes at a time when the word automation is giving jitters to the Indian IT sector. The IT firm is one of the first ones to provide digital services to its clients.

"We operate in a segment where demand is growing at 25-30% unlike traditional IT, which is growing at 2-3%; the market is growing at five times the pace of traditional IT, which is why we still continue to grow," ET quoted Guibert Englebienne, CTO of Globant.

Englebienne also explained that Globant works in a different way as it does not believe in cutting costs but works towards increasing revenue.

Founded in 2003, Globant currently operates in 11 countries – Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, Brazil, the United States, Peru, India, Mexico, Chile and Spain – through 35 development centres with 6,000 employees.

Meanwhile, the Indian IT sector is slowly moving towards automation and this has created ripples in the industry. It has also been said that the industry is likely to hire lesser number of people over the years.

"With automation, the number of people we are hiring in the past will not be the same. It will slow down a little bit. We are also looking at hiring very differential kind of people," Indian Express had earlier quoted Krishnamurthy Shankar, executive vice-president, group head, human resource development, Infosys, as saying.

Pankaj Bansal, co-founder and chief executive officer of PeopleStrong, noted that the job cuts due to automation may not show a drastic impact right away, but it will be visible by around 2020. "The change has started, with companies introducing bots for customer service, managing warehouses, etc.," he told LiveMint.