India’s ITC Infotech sets up shop in Melbourne

Indian-based IT solutions provider ITC Infotech has put boots on the ground in Australia, opening its Asia Pacific headquarters in Melbourne.

ITC Infotech is the IT services arm of ITC Limited, an umbrella company that is listed on the National Stock Exchange of India with $70 billion market capitalisation and over $12 billion in operational revenue.

It provides IT business solutions to large organisations, specialising in the industries that other companies under the ITC Limited umbrella operate in, including consumer packaged goods (CPG), agriculture, logistics and hotels.

The new Melbourne location is being billed as a digital and artificial intelligence (AI) 'engineering hub' that will offer large-scale AI, data, cloud and digital engineering capabilities.

The new headquarters and engineering hub is the culmination of a concerted effort to expand into the Asia Pacific region over the last six months, according to ITC Infotech Asia Pacific senior vice president and business head Shyam Deshpande.

“Roughly around 5% to 6% of our global business is currently from Asia Pacific … and my aim is to make it 10% of the business in the next three years. My specific aim from this particular hub that we're launching is to make this team at least 150 people over the next three years,” he told techpartner.news.

Deshpande said Australia’s position as a global leader in agriculture, CPG, and sustainability were aligned with ITC Infotech’s broader strategy, making it a “natural choice” for an Asia Pacific hub.

“It also happens to be the biggest market,” he added.

“We do believe that for the sectors that we want to focus on in Asia Pacific, it’s best to be based in Australia. We have offices in Singapore, we have a big delivery centre in Kuala Lumpur and we have good operations in the Philippines, but we believe that the real success in the region would be when Australia … leads the growth of the company globally.”

Deshpande said Melbourne was chosen as the hub location because it was the local leader of those key verticals.

“Victoria is the largest market in terms of those sectors - be it agri, CPG, FMCG, as well as  manufacturing," he explained.

The company’s experience in SAP and Salesforce, as well as Oracle, also position it well to serve the Australian market, Deshpande said.

The company is interested in establishing partnerships with tech partners across the Australian channel wherever it would be appropriate.

“Channel partners, companies which have pre-built solutions or software [or] resellers of global software are [all][ people whom we definitely want to work and collaborate closely with for our end customers, absolutely,” he said.

“This is the start, so we'll definitely have to have those kinds of partnerships in place.”

Executives at the facility opening in Melbourne.