 "Keith Schwartz, CEO Bounteous x Accolite")
Earlier this month, US-based Bounteous and Accolite Digital announced their merger to create a larger digital transformation services consultancy player. This merged entity will have a total headcount of 5,000, with India having 3,400 employees. Global CEO Keith Schwartz and Co-CEO Leela Kaza in a virtual meeting with Ashutosh Mishra talks about the targets and India-specific plans of the new merged entity. Edited excerpts:
What does this merger mean for both companies?
Bounteous has a deep engineering heritage, like Accolite, but our market has predominantly been in North America. We tend to serve large Fortune 500 organisations. Accolite has built a very strong product engineering, cloud, and data capability, and one of the things that both of us have seen in the marketplace with our large customers is that they really want a single entity that has all the capabilities to help them end-to-end, and it is hard and challenging to manage a number of partners. So, having a company that has all the capabilities- from design and front-end all the way through to cloud and the data layer, can really make a difference for our customers.
So we are excited about putting these businesses together, growing our book of business with our existing clients, and with our new clients, with this merger.
What does this merger mean from an India point for you?
Post the merger, the 75 per cent metric is our combined headcount after the merger of the two entities. Bounteous was founded and grew up serving the North American market. In 2021, Bounteous entered India, with the acquisition of a company called Lister Digital. About half the headcount of Bounteous is in India to date, and with Accolite, now 75 per cent of our headcount will be in India.
Accolite has been here since 2010. Pre-merger, Accolite had about 2,400 people in India, and now the combined platform has more than 3,500 people, which we're very excited to build from.
We see lots of organic growth from businesses that we have today. So, we do a lot of on-campus hiring with freshers and people are changing careers or making lateral moves. Our headcount has grown significantly in the last three years, and in India, it has tripled over that time period. We look to continue this growth momentum in the future.
Any specific hiring targets with respect to India for this year?
We expect the India headcount to double in the next few years. As we continue to scale and grow, the headcount of India will be significantly strengthened further, since India will be the core hub for the delivery, with the bulk of the headcount being based out of here.
A recent release stated that the company intends to be a $1 billion revenue in the next five years. Do you think it's possible when spends are constrained?
Our growth CAGR has been 20 per cent or above on a compound basis, over many, many years. That we expect to continue. Additionally, we will continue to do mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in order to provide additional skills and capabilities to bring to our customers, and to support us in other geographic regions.
How do you see the current slowdown impacting your business?
There has been a worldwide slowdown in IT spending, and though we have seen a slowness in our growth, we're still growing as a company. But I think that's an opportunity for us to become stronger. A merger of this nature is giving us a deeper client list, a deeper pool of talent, and more capabilities. This is an example of what you can do when growth slows a bit. We are starting to see some uptick in our go-to-market strategy.
I think our clients seem to have more confidence going into 2024, and we expect that will continue into next year as well.
How have you been leveraging the emerging technologies in your business operations?
Data and AI are one of our core practices, which is an integral differentiator for us, including GenAI. We serve specific verticals like banking, financial services, insurance, tech, media, telecom, consumer retail, dining, healthcare- these are some of the core verticals we service. In each of these industries, we have made significant strides in leveraging GenAI to automate as well as to streamline some of the business operations.
Is the deployment of GenAI also impacting the headcount in any manner?
We believe GenAI will create jobs at Bounteous and Accolite. We're training engineers, we are hiring. We don't anticipate that based on just the strategic nature of the work we do, the number of people that we employ here will reduce. I know for other industries or other types of service providers, that's a concern, but we don't anticipate that here at all.
