Tesco to hire 500 for IT division

Tesco, one of UK's leading retail giants, plans to rapidly scale up its IT division in India. A six-fold increase is being planned for this wing, which is expected to be 500-strong by February 2006, according to Philip A Greenwood, head of IT development and support, Tesco Hindustan Service Centre.

Speaking to the Business Standard on the sidelines of his lecture at the Indian Business Academy, Greenwood said that the role of IT professionals in Tesco's Hindustan Service Centre located at Whitefield in Bangalore is increasing.

These professionals, according to him, were playing a key role in developing retail applications on various platforms.

Greenwood ruled out the possibility of Bangalore staff taking over key functions like sales processing for Tesco's ever-increasing online customers. Instead, "they will help the parent company drive sales and cut costs.

The IT division will scale up to 160 people by February 2005 and be 500-strong by February 2006. Currently, Tesco's Hindustan Service Centre has 80 software professionals," Greenwood said.

Greenwood declined to comment on the retail giant's overall IT budget for a year and how India is playing a key role in reducing costs. Instead, he only maintained that the "IT staff alone" would be doubled by February 2005 (Tesco follows a February-March financial year) and then increased to 500 in the following year.

Despite setting up its captive unit in Bangalore and the thrust being given to its IT operations as well as the call centre, Greenwood reiterated that Tesco continues to outsource work to well-known Indian vendors like Infosys.

"Tesco has also given projects to software services companies like Infosys and will continue to do work with such companies," Greenwood said.

In July this year, Tesco had announced that it would move nearly 450 jobs to India. The following month, media reports indicated that Tesco would also run an online IT news portal from Bangalore. It was also reported that this initiative would increase the staff strength to 770 by December 2005.

Elaborating on the role played by Tesco's software professionals in Bangalore, Greenwood said that Tesco subsidiaries in different countries used different applications.

"The staff in Bangalore would help consolidate work done on different applications provided by different vendors too. The team here works on developing retail applications on platforms like Mainframes, PeopleSoft, .NET among others," he added.

On the product sourcing front, Greenwood said that he was not aware of the exact quantity of products that the retail giant sources from India and the neighbouring countries.

The Tesco Group registered nearly £33.5 billion in the previous fiscal, with a pre-tax profit of £1.7 billion.