GCCs + IT services = A happy marriage?

The rise of GCCs threatens to cannibalise Indian IT services’ business, which is already reeling from the impact of multiple global headwinds — from visas to tariffs. A collaboration might just save the day

- SHELLEY SINGH

The growth story of India’s $283 billion information-technology (IT) services industry has been interrupted — not just by new technology like artificial intelligence (AI), but also by a combination of factors, from costlier visas to higher tariffs.

For decades, the sector, hometo5.8 million workers, was defined by big outsourcing firms — such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, Cognizant, Tech Mahindra — and mid-tier firms like Mphasis, Hexaware Technologies, and LTIMindtree. In recent years, though, another force has quietly redrawn the map — the rise of global capability centres (GCCs), the in-house, captive hubs of multinationals.

Global corporations, including JPMorgan, Fidelity International, Barclays Bank, Lowe's, Lufthansa, McDonald's, and Cargill, are expanding their delivery centres in India.

According to a July 2025 report titled “National Framework on GCCs” by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India hosts over 1,800 GCCs, up from 700 in 2010. They now employ more than two million professionals, among whom are engineers, data scientists, and risk analysts, who might have otherwise joined traditional IT firms.

“For prominent IT services companies, organic growth has been anaemic, hovering in the low single digits,” says Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, partner, Catalincs, a tech advisory firm. “The question haunting boardrooms is: How much will GCCs cannibalise India’s outsourcing giants — and how better can they collaborate with them? We have already seen some opportunity loss for IT services companies as GCCs expanded rapidly in the last four years.”

Ramamoorthy, who is former chairman and managing director of Cognizant India, sees IT companies collaborating aggressively with GCCs, entering into joint ventures, and even offering Build-operate-Transfer (BoT) services. And in the long term, some GCCs could hive off their units to IT companies for greater efficiency and effectiveness.