DesiGuy
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SIRUSERI, India A massive futuristic office complex is rising from a patch of spare, arid land here near the southern Indian city of Chennai. Six butterfly-shaped buildings dock like spacecraft to two long metal-latticed terminals.
About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by Indias largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tatas nearly 180,000 employees.
Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tatas biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvres glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid-2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000.
It is all part of a construction spree by Indias outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers.
The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nations top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers.
In this nation where world-class high-tech companies co-exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant-garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries.
And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business.
T. V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his companys eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nations inclusive sensibility. One singular thing is monotonous, he said. In India, we are a colorful people.
Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nations arrival on the world stage. But unlike China, where the government and state-owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects.
And within Indias business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients. State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses.
Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable. But among those most qualified typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science as many as 18 percent leave for other jobs every year. The outsourcing companies see lavish, environmentally friendly campuses as a way to help attract and retain the best and brightest workers.
With their manicured lawns, power generators and lakes, the campuses are a noticeable improvement on most engineering colleges, which suffer from Indias standard infrastructure deficiencies blackouts, water shortages and poor maintenance.
I prefer a big campus, said Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, 23, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four-year-old office in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, as a software tester. The facilities are better in a big campus.
Tata Consultancy Services or T.C.S., as the company is known is spending $200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan-born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad.
But some critics say that too many of the industrys new complexes are intended to make a big splash without much thought of how they will function and fit into the local surroundings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/business/global/28sizzle.html?ref=asia
About 12,000 people already work at the campus, being built by Indias largest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services. It eventually will have space for 24,000 of Tatas nearly 180,000 employees.
Meanwhile Infosys, one of Tatas biggest competitors, has added a corporate campus for 15,000 employees with buildings that resemble the Parthenon, the Coliseum and the Louvres glass pyramid. Infosys plans to build an additional 10 million square feet of custom office space by mid-2012, at various sites, adding 25,000 workers to its current 122,000.
It is all part of a construction spree by Indias outsourcing companies, which are growing at a breakneck pace after the lull caused by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
But the building boom is about more than making room for more workers.
The outsourcing giants, which include Wipro and others, hope that architectural sizzle can help them compete for the nations top software programmers, while also burnishing their reputations with overseas clients and prospective customers.
In this nation where world-class high-tech companies co-exist with urban slums and rural poverty, employers like Tata, Infosys and Wipro have set out to create avant-garde, environmentally smart corporate sanctuaries.
And even if some architects and critics complain about the wisdom and taste of the efforts, the executives behind the building boom say their ambitious projects put a modern face on Indian business.
T. V. Mohandas Pai, a director at Infosys, which has 15 campuses around India, said his companys eclectic mix of designs from all over the world reflected this nations inclusive sensibility. One singular thing is monotonous, he said. In India, we are a colorful people.
Like China a decade earlier, India appears to be at that phase of economic development where buildings are meant to help advertise the nations arrival on the world stage. But unlike China, where the government and state-owned corporations took the lead, private companies in India have headed the charge not the government, which struggles to execute even basic construction projects.
And within Indias business world, technology companies have been more adventurous than others, perhaps because of their outsize financial success and their need to hire tens of thousands of workers to write software for foreign clients. State and federal governments are aiding the effort by offering these companies generous tax incentives and choice pieces of real estate to build big campuses.
Competition for employees is intense, because while India produces about 500,000 engineers every year, most colleges provide such poor education that the industry says that just a quarter of graduates are employable. But among those most qualified typically graduates of elite places like the Indian Institutes of Technology and Birla Institute of Technology and Science as many as 18 percent leave for other jobs every year. The outsourcing companies see lavish, environmentally friendly campuses as a way to help attract and retain the best and brightest workers.
With their manicured lawns, power generators and lakes, the campuses are a noticeable improvement on most engineering colleges, which suffer from Indias standard infrastructure deficiencies blackouts, water shortages and poor maintenance.
I prefer a big campus, said Aditya Mathur, a software engineer, 23, who joined Wipro a year ago, and now works at a four-year-old office in Gurgaon, south of New Delhi, as a software tester. The facilities are better in a big campus.
Tata Consultancy Services or T.C.S., as the company is known is spending $200 million on its Siruseri campus and has hired the Uruguayan-born Canadian architect Carlos A. Ott, who designed the opera house on the Place de la Bastille in Paris. The company is also building big campuses in Ahemdabad, Pune, Calcutta and Hyderabad.
But some critics say that too many of the industrys new complexes are intended to make a big splash without much thought of how they will function and fit into the local surroundings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/business/global/28sizzle.html?ref=asia
