News Release

HCL Launches South Africa Glocal Centre of Excellence Offering Customer and Partner Support for Cisco Solutions throughout Africa

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, NOIDA, India, 6 July 2012 -
cisco_building_corporate_002-jpg-1889882-1-0
Jul 06, 2012

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, NOIDA, India, 6 July  2012 - Leading global IT services provider HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCL) today announced the opening of a South Africa Glocal Centre of Excellence (GCoE) in Johannesburg, as part of its commitment to building a socially responsible business.  HCL is collaborating closely with Cisco to develop the curricula for the centre, which will train local engineers on advanced Cisco technologies to support clients across Africa, and more specifically South Africa.

Highlights / Key Facts:

  • HCL's already established Global Cisco Hub in India has over 15 years' experience in creating engineering talent in advanced technologies.
  • The Johannesburg GCoE which is also operated by HCL, will align with the India hub to address the skills shortage for advanced technologies in both regions. HCL has already trained an initial batch of 26 local engineers who are already deployed on key projects in five regional hubs across South Africa, with plans to train 100 engineers at the centre over next 12 months.
  • The launch of the South Africa Hub capitalizes on HCL's core strength in training large numbers of engineers and will see this strategy expanded further and rolled out on a wider base.
  • The GCoE will serve customers either directly and indirectly through HCL's partner network throughout Africa, It will also service clients by developing ICT skill sets thus ultimately creating trained local personnel to deploy and manage advanced solutions.
  • The centre will support a number of vertical sectors including Service Providers, BFSI, the Public Sector , Retail and Mining industry, and joins existing GCoEs in the US and EU in running dedicated recruitment and training programs for college graduates. A pilot programme running at centers in Seattle, WA and Cary, NC in the US, Helsinki in Finland, Krakow in Poland and Dublin in Ireland has already provided a platform for developing IT skill pool in local communities through collaboration with anchor customers and universities.

Executive Quotes:

Ashish Gupta, senior vice president and head - EMEA, HCL ISD, HCL Technologies

"As more and more companies in the west look for new avenues of growth we are increasingly seeing a large demand for leading edge IT solutions coming in from emerging markets like Africa. The Johannesburg Glocal Center of Excellence is an important part of our strategy in the way we plan to serve our customers and partners throughout Africa and underlines our core philosophy of creating talent pools in the markets we operate to manage advanced technology solutions which can help our customers take advantage of the latest technologies for their business.

Stefano Mattiello, director, Channels for Cisco South Africa

 "South Africa offers many unique advantages for customer services support and also aligns with Cisco's focus to partner with emerging countries in order to create innovative and inclusive business models enabled by technology. We choose to collaborate with HCL in South Africa because of its innovative, world-class support services. The centers of excellence we operate help us provide a global reach through the use of technology. We lead in the way of adopting Web 2.0 tools that allow us to work virtually and do business anytime, anywhere, with high levels of operational efficiency."

Links / URLs:

About HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company, working with clients in the areas that impact and redefine

the core of their businesses. Since its inception into the global landscape after its IPO in 1999, HCL focuses on ‘transformational outsourcing', underlined by innovation and value creation, and offers integrated portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure management, engineering and R&D services and BPO. HCL leverages its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 26 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employee First, Customer Second' which empowers our 83,076 transformers to create a real value for the customers. HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, has reported consolidated revenues of US$ 3.9 billion (` 18,334 crores), as on 31 December 2011 (on LTM basis). For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

About HCL Enterprise

HCL is a $6.2 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two companies listed in India – HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded in 1976, HCL is one of India's original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer ofmodern computing and a transformational enterprise, HCL's diverse range of hardware and software offerings span a wide array of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of 88,000 professionals of diverse nationalities, who operate from 31 countries including over 500 points of presence in India. For more on HCL, please visit www.hcl.com.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com.  For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

# # #

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.