India’s Hexaware to add 1,200 UK tech staff

Hexaware is recruiting around 1,200 tech and techno-functional staff in the UK, with the IT services planning to spread its operation north.

The company is spending £25m on UK infrastructure, which will see an expansion of existing sites and the addition of research and development (R&D) hubs in the north of England.

This time last year, the Indian heritage company, which has 32,000 global staff, had just 650 employees in the UK, but a growing customer base – including in the UK public sector – has engendered expansion plans.

The company wants to recruit half of its new hires from universities, with the remainder made up of a mix of functional people, as well as through people brought onboard through specialist acquisitions.

Hexaware opened an office in Canary Wharf a year ago, which added to an IT services operation it had in Birmingham from 2023. This year – if all goes to plan – will see R&D operations open in Leeds and Manchester as well as an expansion of existing sites. Currently, around 65% of the company’s staff are based south of Birmingham, but it wants to change this with a planned 50/50 split between the north and south.

According to Parameshwaran Iyer, head of UK and Europe at Hexaware, the new recruits will be formed from a mix of deep technical and techno-functional people. “Most of the jobs will be in the areas we are currently seeing a lot of demand for. This includes cyber security, data science and machine learning,” he said.

He said for the next year, artificial intelligence (AI) tech experts and businesspeople who understand AI will be the biggest focus, but he added: “We are also keeping an eye on some of the frontier technologies.”

This includes quantum computing. “While AI was in experimentation in the past one or two years, now people are trying to scale it in areas wherever they see a lot of value,” Iyer told Computer Weekly. “It’s all about scale in AI in the next two years, but maybe after two or three years, quantum is going to come.”

In anticipation of this, Hexaware is looking to work with specialist startups in quantum computing. “We’re keeping an eye on that, talking to a number of boutique startups who are doing something on that, trying to see how we can help the startup ecosystem.”

He said healthcare, life sciences and insurance could be sectors where quantum computing has a calling. “In the field of healthcare and life sciences, there is a lot of potential for quantum as well as is insurance – where there’s a lot of calculation to be done, there could be a lot of quantum computing required.”

Hexaware’s planned acquisitions could include companies focused on quantum computing technology. Beyond technology focus, the company continues to target the UK public sector. In the UK, this is a relatively untapped market for many Indian heritage suppliers such as Hexaware, and it is one that the company is targeting.

In October, the company launched its UK public sector plan internally. It has since hired a public sector leader as well as an adviser on the sector. It has also met UK government officials and departments alongside India IT industry body Nasscom, and has won a place on government procurement frameworks.