Published on the 11/09/2014 | Written by Beverley Head

Leading Indian technology vendors are expanding their footprint in the Australian market, and looking to acquire already scarce local IT skills to meet growing demand…

India based Wipro has announced its first graduate hiring initiative in Australia, seeking engineering and computer science graduates who it plans to take to India for a six month training programme, before returning the employees to Australia to work on local projects.

The company says that the initiative is part of a plan to localise its workforce in geographies across the world.

Wipro has had an Australian presence since 2001 and has more than 1500 employees meeting the needs of customers locally. It’s also part of a growing diaspora of Indian IT companies which have carved out a substantial – and growing – business in the local market.

Just this month Infosys announced that as part of a global IT services deal signed with BP it would provide computer services in Australia to support BP’s upstream activities in oil and gas exploration, while HCL Technologies has been chosen by Sydney Trains to provide application management and IT support services.

Balaji Ram, head of financial services for HCL in A/NZ and the global core practice lead, in a recent interview also said that the company’s technology had been deployed by three of the nation’s four leading banks.

Tata Consulting Services meanwhile has also enjoyed success in the financial sector with its Bancs system which has been deployed at Australian organisations including CUA and MyState.

These well-established Australian outposts of Indian IT companies are also being joined by newcomers such as Servion Global Solutions which announced just this March that it would establish an Australian headquarters in Melbourne.

While traditionally the business model of these organisations has involved sending much of the programming work offshore, using wages arbitrage in order to reduce costs, there are now signs that Indian companies may be looking to hire more local personnel.

Wipro has shown its hand early, but organisations such as Infosys, which has gone public about its ambitions to rapidly grow its Government revenue streams, has also been warned by Gartner that it needs to overcome the perception that it is an offshore outsourcer if it wants to win more public sector business.

Hiring local talent could well be a first step toward winning that public relations battle.