TCS Ireland’s country head Deepak Chaudhari discusses the multinational’s greater focus on Ireland, the growth of its global delivery centre in Donegal and the key sectors TCS is moving into.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been in Ireland since 2001, but it has increased its presence here significantly in recent years by growing its workforce and taking on new national projects.
Founded in 1968, TCS is one of the world’s largest IT service providers and has more than 600,000 employees across 55 countries. The India-headquartered company has staff in multiple Irish counties including Dublin, Cork, Athlone and Galway, along with more than 1,400 staff in Donegal.
The IT giant has made some significant strides in recent years, taking an interest in emerging technology such as the metaverse and EV technology. In Ireland, TCS recently secured a major Government contract to manage a new pension auto-enrolment system. The contract is reportedly valued at up to €150m.
TCS’ Irish operations have grown under the leadership of Deepak Chaudhari, who became the country head for TCS Ireland in 2018. Bringing decades of leadership experience to the role, Chaudhari has been focused on boosting TCS Ireland’s role both nationally and internationally.
“The way I describe my purpose of being here is to bring global experiences and deliver them locally,” he said. “We’ve got deep industry domain expertise in several industries and we work with some of the top customers in every industry. So there’s a lot to learn from all of our experiences.
“How can we bring those experiences for the benefit of Irish companies is the purpose that I operate with.”
A greater Irish focus
TCS has had a presence in Ireland for a long time, but Chaudhari said the initial operation here was quite small, being designed to support global clients that had operations in Ireland. But in recent years, the IT giant has had a greater focus on “the Irish market in itself”.
“Knowing the role Ireland is playing across Europe, and the progressive economy it is, we felt it was prudent for us to really invest into the geography as well as be a part of contributing to the growth of the economy,” he said.
One of the biggest expansions for TCS Ireland came in 2020 when it acquired Donegal-based Pramerica. This paved the way for TCS’ to develop its global delivery centre in Letterkenny. The company provides a range of services from this centre, from cloud and IT support to cybersecurity protection.
Chaudhari said TCS has transferred staff over to support this centre, in response to the growing business the company has in Ireland and elsewhere.
“That’s providing services to both Irish clients and European and UK and US customers,” Chaudhari said. “That was one of the key breakthroughs for TCS. But even so, after that, we have taken several initiatives with our customers, which has been really groundbreaking for us to really establish very deep into particular industries.”
Chaudhari said TCS is working with “key companies” who are shaping the everyday life of Irish citizens, such as businesses in utilities, car manufacturers and large banks.
“We’ve also been working with pharmaceutical and retail companies as well, and also shaping up the education sector,” he said. “So we are helping with the digital marketing solutions as well for the mock examinations, working with companies there. So I’m very proud of being able to make an impact across industries where we are able to influence and help better Irish citizens.
“I do want to bring TCS to be a very strong player within the Irish market for both the public sector and private sector. And we remain invested and committed to make it happen for our customers and also for the Irish Government.”
Digital transformation
TCS has won various awards for innovation and was listed in a Forbes list of the top 100 most innovative companies in the world. With a focus on so many industries, Chaudhari shared some of the key technologies that clients are focusing on.
One of those is – unsurprisingly – AI. Chaudhari said these days, it seems like no meeting is done without the mention of AI.
“I think AI has existed for a number of years, but it’s got its prominence much more in the recent years, especially with the advent of generative AI and the way the impacts could be realised, both at a personal and organisational level,” he said.
Chaudhari said TCS did a “massive survey” with more than 1,300 business consultants across multiple industries and found that the vast majority had “already taken some steps” into adopting AI technology. But he also said that many of these consultants had not worked out the impacts that AI will cause “from a data point of view”.
“So there is a short-term focus and a long-term focus every company is trying to grapple through,” Chaudhari said. “There’s a lot of emphasis on certain quick wins, what companies could have by the short-term views of digital investments, automation, AI-led interventions.”
To help companies on their AI journey, Chaudhair said TCS has launched WisdomNext, a platform that provides access to a number of large language models.
The goal of this platform is to bring multiple AI and cloud services into a single interface have AI models that are designed to help specific industries, such as utilities, retail or banking.
Chaudhari said digital transformation remains a key goal for many companies and one Irish example he shared of TCS’ work in this sector is with AIB Life. This tech-led joint venture was set up last year by AIB and Great-West Lifeco. TCS was chosen as its partner to build and operate a end-to-end, cloud-based platform.
In addition to designing and deploying the enabling technology stack, TCS is also providing IT, customer, and claims handling services for AIB Life. These services are being provided by TCS’ global deliver centre in Letterkenny.
AIB Life was recently awarded the global Celent Model Insurer Award in the category of ‘Digital and Emerging Technologies’.
“We are happy to kind of bring our products and platforms and implement them digitally, offer digital solutions to our customers,” Chaudhari said. “They are able to very quickly get entire systems up and running and launch themselves into the market and provide the services there. So you don’t need to start looking at the hardware, the servers, the software… everything can come as a service and you just need to configure it right for your business needs.”
Chaudhari said cybersecurity is another key area being looked at by TCS’ customers, so the IT giant is also providing cybersecurity protection from its Letterkenny facility.
“We provide services to Irish customers as well as a number of global customers from Letterkenny,” he said. “So security is becoming a big challenge and we are hoping to play a good role to help our customers as well.”
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