Tech on deck
Access to top-notch educational institutions and teamwork — aided by a longtime friendship — help attract an Infosys technology hub.
Challenge: Convince a global technology-consulting company to locate an innovation hub in North Carolina’s Triangle region.
Solution: Assemble a unified team of recruiters representing state and local government, business, and education, and tap into the region’s rich community-college and university systems to access and train talented workers.
By Teri Saylor
A thriving education and business ecosystem, a longtime friendship and a dose of Southern hospitality all came together in 2017 to lure a global technology firm and 2,000 jobs to the Triangle region of North Carolina. Early that year, N.C. Sen. Jay Chaudhuri learned that India-based Infosys Limited had established a technology and innovation hub in Indianapolis and was looking to develop four others in the United States. At the hubs, workers assist customers with issues such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, emerging digital technologies and big data.
Overseeing the search for new locations was Anurag Varma, vice president and head of global government affairs for Infosys. About 20 years earlier, a mutual friend had introduced Chaudhuri to Varma — both are attorneys, and both share an interest in developing relations between the U.S. and India. Recognizing that Wake County would be an ideal location for the company, Chaudhuri reached out.
“We are a perfect fit, first and foremost, because of the talent pool we have in the region, in addition to the educational institutions we have here, particularly Wake Technical Community College and N.C. State University,” Chaudhuri says.
By July, economic-development officials had inked a deal: Infosys said it would invest $8.7 million in an innovation hub in Raleigh, following a process that seemed to move at warp speed compared with the sometimes glacial pace of many economic-development projects. North Carolina edged out seven other states under consideration for the jobs, which will be created over five years and will pay an average annual salary of $72,146.
“I suspect if you talk with economic-development recruiters, they will tell you this was an incredibly fast turnaround,” Chaudhuri says of the 90- to 120-day process.
In August 2018, Infosys, a $10.9 billion company with headquarters in Bangalore, India, cut the ribbon on a new office in the Brier Creek mixed-use development near Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The firm is the anchor tenant in the six-story building. By September, Infosys had hired 500 employees in the state, representing a quarter of its target workforce of 2,000.
The Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina, a public-private organization that helps with job-recruiting efforts, touts the new hub as one of the largest economic-development wins in the history of Wake County. Raleigh, the state capital, is the county seat.
For Infosys, picking Raleigh was an easy decision.
“One of the many reasons we chose to establish a hub in Raleigh is that the Research Triangle is home to a skilled and talented workforce as well as a rich higher-education ecosystem, including top universities such as Duke, UNC [Chapel Hill] and N.C. State,” says Ravi Kumar, president and deputy chief operating officer of Infosys.
Kumar was specifically attracted to an N.C. State program offering a master of science in analytics, one of the company’s key technology consulting offerings. He also cites the area’s vibrant professional community, affordable housing, cultural activities and relatively low cost of living.
Aggressive growth has been a hallmark of Infosys’ history. In 1981, N.R. Narayana Murthy and six engineers in Pune, India, established the company with an initial capital investment of $250. Today, the publicly traded consulting and technology-services company has more than 209,000 employees who work with clients in 45 countries, Kumar says.
In addition to the operations in North Carolina and Indiana, Infosys has announced additional hubs in Connecticut and Arizona, along with a design and innovation hub in Rhode Island, each targeting 2,000 employees. “Across the board, collaboration between government, business, and colleges and universities here was incredibly seamless, and I think that clearly resonated with Infosys,” Chaudhuri says. “Infosys understood the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce was working closely with Wake Technical Community College and N.C. State University, members of the General Assembly, the N.C. Commerce Department and the governor’s office. We were all in this together, and they knew we were going to be there to support the company once they made their decision to select Raleigh.”
Chaudhuri was appointed to the N.C. Senate in April 2016 to complete the term of Josh Stein, who had been elected as the state’s attorney general. He won the seat in the November 2016 election, and before long he began selling Varma on Raleigh as a perfect fit for the new Infosys hub. “The conversations with Anurag started in earnest in February or March of 2017. At that point, I put him in touch with Chris Chung, executive director of the EDPNC, and the North Carolina Department of Commerce,” Chaudhuri says.
In May, Kumar and other top Infosys executives met with Gov. Roy Cooper, and by June, the company had begun to indicate they were going to select Raleigh for the new hub. Other key players were Adrienne Cole, president and chief executive officer of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce, Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane, and Tom Looney, a veteran technology executive who is chairman of the Wake Technical Community College board of trustees and a leader in economic-development initiatives.
“North Carolina has a unique story to tell,” Looney says. “Our value proposition is a large university system and [one of the] the largest and strongest community-college systems in the country. All of our community colleges will play a large role in growing technology talent to serve industries.”
Infosys plans to put the community colleges to good use. “Training and recruiting at community colleges is critical to expanding the U.S. talent pipeline and addressing the skills gap,” Kumar says. “We are focused on reskilling people at all phases of their careers, from current students to more experienced professionals.”
Infosys’ Raleigh hub coincides with construction of a new Wake Tech campus in Research Triangle Park, near RDU airport and about 7 miles from the company’s new office. The 94-acre campus will offer substantial technology coursework, including networks, cybersecurity, open-source computing and artificial intelligence, according to Rita Jerman, vice president of student services and the RTP campus manager. The campus also will house corporate and business training programs.
“When companies locate here, part of the incentive package is customized training, and this is a big selling point for economic development,” Jerman says. “On this campus, we have three classrooms dedicated to Infosys training.”
In August 2018, Wake Tech held a ribbon-cutting for the first of nine buildings at RTP. The campus welcomed its first students the next month, with more than 1,000 enrolled. When complete, it will accommodate 9,000 students, according to Jerman. The new Wake Tech campus was a major selling point in convincing Infosys to locate a hub in Raleigh, company officials say.
“When we first decided to expand our operations in North Carolina, we also expanded our partnerships with institutions of higher education to create a pipeline of talent from top universities and community colleges,” Kumar says. “But our partnerships go way beyond recruitment. We are working with the N.C. Community College System and N.C. State University, among others, to create a customized program designed to train our new hires in the latest technological skills to be workforce ready on Day 1, following graduation.”
Infosys is taking hiring from colleges a step further, offering a career track including significant training to employees who graduate from community colleges with two-year associate degrees. It is the first effort of this kind in the company’s history, according to Kumar.
The approach is unique, Kumar says. “Our value proposition is to hire right out of college and create new jobs.” Such programs will help Infosys — which has a history of hiring H-1B visa workers to fill U.S. jobs — fulfill a goal announced in 2017 of hiring 10,000 U.S. workers. Last year, Forbes ranked Infosys among the top 50 companies in the United States for hiring new graduates.
The region and state will start seeing tangible economic benefits as the new hub becomes fully staffed.
“This new location will add $140 million to the new payroll, which will lead to new spending,” says Chung, who has led the EDPNC since 2015. “In addition, a global information-technology company like Infosys is the best recommendation letter the state can get to attract global companies to select North Carolina for their long-term strategies.”
Kumar says hiring from local markets allows Infosys to stay close to its clients, mainly large corporations needing to rapidly bring digital technology to their businesses to compete with next-generation companies. In May 2018, longtime IBM executive Deverre Lierman of Raleigh was named to head the Raleigh hub.
While Infosys is targeting 2,000 employees, Chaudhuri has encouraged the company to establish a full campus in Raleigh. Kumar won’t rule out additional growth but prefers waiting to see how the demand for technology and digital services evolves in the state. Meanwhile, the company is moving at an aggressive pace to hire and train employees.
Chaudhuri, a Democrat serving in a GOP-controlled Senate, says helping recruit a company that is going to hire 2,000 employees for high-paying jobs is his single greatest achievement during his first elected term in office.
“I have been thinking about my role and all the ways I can help my community, and this experience has created a lot of incentives for me to continue to reach out to my own personal network and to other networks to sell this region,” he says.
It wasn’t by chance or accident that Infosys answered the call, Chaudhuri says. Rather, it was a team effort. Once a connection was made between Infosys and the EDPNC, there was much behind-the-scenes gathering of information as well as continued lobbying, which involved sketching out a comprehensive agenda and orchestrating each team member’s assignment. No detail was overlooked, all the way down to the seating arrangement inside the SUV driven to RDU Airport to meet Kumar during a site visit.
“Making the connection in many instances is not the only important factor in recruiting a company. You have to be actively engaged once the process starts,” Chaudhuri says. “Gov. Cooper actively reached out, and the folks at Commerce and the [EDPNC] were incredibly active in following up to make sure we addressed any of the needs the company had.”
Kumar says North Carolina has been very kind to Infosys.
“From academic institutions to large corporations to local businesses, everyone said they looked forward to having us locate here,” he says. “They showed us a unique government and business partnership, so we made visits and evaluated the area based on our top three criteria: good academic environment, good local client pool and good proactive government.”