Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has quickly climbed the ladder of success and Indian engineers have played an important role in taking it to the heights much coveted by many tech companies, according to a report from the Times of India. As per the latest estimates, engineers from India make one-third of the total engineering staff-strength of the $171 billion company and IT vendors from India handle a large proportion of the company’s enterprise software, service and support work, which is also growing rapidly.
Indian engineers vital for Apple<
In the period from 2001-2010, 1750 H1-B applications were filed by Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), which saw a sharp rise in the period 2011-13 with 2800 applications filed. The majority of H1-B employees is said to be from India, and it has been concluded by HfS Research based in the U.S. that the dependence on Indian engineers has increased in the past few years.
“About one-third of Apple’s engineering headcount consists of Indians who are either on H-1B or on Green Card,” said Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at HfS Research.
The conclusions drawn by HfS Research are based on the employee data disclosed by Apple in 2012, which revealed that in the U.S. it had 47000 direct workers. Customer support operators were 7700 and 27350 were employed in retail Apple stores. Engineers, designers, marketers and other white-collar tech product workers together made up 12,000 employees.
Outsourcing to Indian IT vendors
According to the research firm, five of the IT vendors come from India of which four are big and one is small.
“Apple’s outsourcing strategy can be described in three words as ‘outsourcing for growth’. The scope of outsourcing work has been enlarged in the last two or three years. From 2013, Apple has dedicated IT outsourcing vendor managers based out of Bangalore who are acting as the bridge between Apple’s IT managers and India based IT vendors,” said Jain.
While the names of India based IT vendors has not been disclosed by HfS Research, but few known names are Tata Consultancy Services Limited (NSE:TCS), Wipro Limited (NSE:WIPRO) and Infosys Ltd. ADR (NYSE:INFY), who has Apple among the top 10 clients.
For a host of services including application development & maintenance, business intelligence & data-warehousing, data analytics applications, enterprise application integration and ERP implementation, Apple seeks to engage with the Indian IT players. Besides these, software support for development and maintenance of Apple retail stores, specific work for iTunes, iCloud, internal applications of release management, job search portals, and porting of web applications to iOS mobile are few more services provided by the Indian vendors.
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