In 2016, the centre will focus a lot on application development and testing, business intelligence and analytics, mobility and support of AstraZeneca’s Digital Health initiatives
AstraZeneca has successfully established its IT presence in India with its Global Technology Centre (GTC) at Chennai. This year marks a key milestone in AstraZeneca’s journey of setting up India as a global technology delivery hub. The GTC in Chennai is AstraZeneca’s first, insourced IT facility globally, delivering significant value to the business through an end-to-end, integrated IT service delivery model.
In 2016, the centre will focus a lot on application development and testing, business intelligence and analytics, mobility and support of AstraZeneca’s Digital Health initiatives. AstraZeneca has adopted a wide range of employee friendly policies and has placed significant emphasis on increasing gender diversity in the workplace. This year, the company has also been able to also induct the next generation of IT talent into its workforce through campus recruitment efforts across major engineering colleges in Chennai.
The centre has adopted a fully integrated operating model, helping simplify support structures and improve responsiveness to business needs. With Chennai emerging as an IT hotspot with a broad and deep population of IT talent, the GTC has been able to attract talent across all major areas of the IT landscape with the company’s emphasis on Technical Leadership and a being a ‘Great Place to Work’.
Launched in September 2014, the Chennai Centre was established to improve the IT organisation’s efficiency and responsiveness in support of 61,500 AstraZeneca employees worldwide. The centre has insourced IT Applications and Infrastructure Management functions previously outsourced to eight global vendors. While the journey started with a target of 300 employees in the first year and 1000 in the second year, the early success resulted in an upward revision in scope and scale of the operations. The centre now grown to more than 1,500 qualified IT professionals in 18 months since inception and expects to grow to over 2000 IT professionals by the end of 2016.
David Smoley, Chief Information Officer, AstraZeneca said, “The new in-house service delivery model has resulted in improved speed of response to the business, increased internal knowledge of critical IT systems, enhanced end-user satisfaction with IT services and significantly reduced costs of IT operations. The GTC staff have a high level of IT experience and expertise, and have been able to make valuable contributions in the very first year of our live operations.”
Siva Padmanabhan, Head of Chennai Global Technology Center says, “A unique feature of the Chennai centre is that every one of AstraZeneca’s major global IT functions is represented here. This enables the company to offer broad career opportunities to our employees.