India’s Tata consultancy to hire 80 IT specialists in Ireland

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of India's largest companies by market capitalisation, is to create more than 80 high-skilled jobs across Ireland on the back of a projected increase in business here.

TCS provides IT services, consulting and business solutions, and is the biggest company in the Mumbai-headquartered Tata Group of more than 100 businesses. The group is part-owned by Pallonji Mistry, the Indian-born industrialist, who became an Irish citizen in 2003 and whose wife was born in Dublin.

The company employs 324,000 people across 46 countries and reported revenues of $15.5 billion (€14 billion) for the year ending March 31st, 2015. It has about 1,500 clients including BT, Chrysler, Cisco, Commerzbank and Microsoft.

The company, which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, was founded in 1968. It first established operations in Ireland in 2001 and now employs 100 consultants locally. It provides a wide range of IT-related products and services, including application development, business process outsourcing, capacity planning, enterprise software, payment processing, software management and technology education services.

The firm said it intends to take on at least 80 IT specialists in Ireland including project managers, business analysts, developers, functional analysts and testers.

Along with Google, TCS has been one of the main companies to avail of employment permits for non-European citizens, which were introduced to help plug a skills shortage in the tech sector in Ireland. Venkatesh Priyadarshi, the company's head of Ireland operations and business development, admitted that recruiting locally was a challenge.

Economy improving

He said that with the economy improving the company had seen a big rise in demand for the digital and business solutions it provides. The firm expects to grow its business significantly here over the next 12 months.

“We are very bullish about Ireland. We have our multinational clients here who we are supporting and many indigenous customers, and all of them are in investment mode. We are seeing humongous opportunities and so are preparing for this by taking on more people,” said Mr Priyadarshi.

TCS is one of the largest providers of examination assessment software in the world, and Mr Priyadarshi said this was a key area of growth for the company. It has been involved in talks with Government officials and universities in Ireland in recent years over its plans in this space, which revolve around massive open online courses (MOOCs), which are free and paid study programmes offered by universities, including Stanford and Trinity College Dublin.

“If you look at education today, it is being transformed. There is a good opportunity for Ireland to take a leadership position in this because we are only at the beginning of a revolution in how people learn,” said Mr Priyadarshi.