IBM Global Services India has lined up significant growth plans for 2003 following its success in bagging new and major orders from overseas clients.

"IGSI would be looking to recruit a large number of talented people across all its four centres," Amitabh Ray, director-exports of IGSI, said. IBM had 4,700 people on its payroll in December 2002.

"IGSI bagged its first major foreign contract from a global company just a couple of days ago, and this represents a big leap forward for the entity created after the takeover of the management consulting business of PricewaterhouseCoopers by IBM," Ray added.

The integration of the two businesses has been completed and the merged teams for different practices were now in place to bag overseas orders.

"IGSI has today emerged as the most competent services enterprise driven entirely by client needs, selling and implementing complete range of solutions and products and not just IBM products," Ray said.

One major growth driver would be corporates looking for outsourcing solutions in totality. IGSI intends to be the end-to-end outsourcing provider, offering infrastructure, maintenance, project development and process outsourcing services.

"IGSI would be offering companies an opportunity to convert their fixed costs into a variable cost and offer e-business solutions on demand," Ray said.

Internally, IGSI's growth would be driven by competencies  in technologies, covering middleware, e-business technologies, enterprise and web technologies, data warehousing, human resource services, customer relationship and application management services.

It has four fully functional offshore delivery centres at Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata and Gurgaon. Kolkata was the centre for excellence for e-business, SAP R/3, Oracle applications and data warehousing.