Peter Marsh’s January 31, 2007, Financial Times article, "A new twist to India IT outsourcing," provides an interesting perspective on TCS’s strategy going forward. TCS, a publically traded firm which is 80% owned by the parent Tata industrial conglomerate, current employs about 83,000 people, a third of whom work outside India. Yet TCS anoints a mere 1,000 with the title of "consultant" – a number that’s likely to grow to between 3,000 and 4,000 in the next five years. Consultants are "the people trying to sell … large project-based IT contracts," the type offered by rival business consultancies such as IBM Global Services and Accenture.
Marsh notes that TCS’s employment structure is a layered one, analogous to that seen in many global manufacturing companies, where employees are assigned to functional groups at regional centers. These centers may not be physically close to actual customers and their sites, however, so certain job functions – sales and final assembly, for example - are often located in target countries, even if costs are high. Consultants, too, tend to be located in high cost venues, where they essentially become part of the "shop windows advertising the group’s capabilities."
