 "UST Global to hire 3,000 engineers for its new $100 mn India campus")
**New York:**California-headquartered technology solutions and services firm UST Global plans to hire several thousand new employees in India to work in its sprawling new $100 million campus being built in Trivandrum, said UST Global Chief Executive Officer Sajan Pillai.
The 3,000 new hires will be added to an existing Indian workforce of 8,000 when the firm’s 36-acre campus in Trivandrum opens in November this year.
The state-of-the-art campus will stand tall next to the current Infosys facility in Trivandrum’s technopark.
“Serving our customers globally requires us to be on a quest to explore and expand in new places. Due to our rapid growth we have had the ability to expand within our existing locations like Bangalore and Trivandrum,” Pillai told Firstpost.
“We are setting up a campus in Trivandrum on 36 acres of land with over $100 million in investment in phase one. We are also planning to expand in central and northern India symbolizing UST’S commitment to grow and expand in India,” added Pillai.
[caption id=“attachment_948039” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Nikki Arora, Director, marketing and global talent acquisition at UST Global and CEO Sajan Pillai see India as a source for talent and innovation. Picture: UST Global[/caption]
UST has 135 Fortune 100 clients in the health care, insurance, retail, financial services, manufacturing, media, utility, and energy industries. It currently has 12,000 employees, but expects headcount to rapidly expand over the next three years. The company sees the new talent coming from countries such as India, Mexico, Spain, Greece and Saudi Arabia.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“Over the next three years we plan to train 100,000 engineers globally of which at least 30,000 will be in India,” said Nikki Arora, Director, marketing and global talent acquisition at UST Global.
“We have partnerships with over 135 academic institutions in India, whom we guide, and assist to train and develop young talent,” added Arora.
UST Global has already taken the fairly unusual step of choosing Leon in Mexico to set up a new IT center, which will eventually be filled with 10,000 employees.
“Mexico being the tenth largest economy has great potential. Spanish is one the most widely spoken languages; it ranks at No. 3 among the world’s top 50 languages. Having a bilingual workforce will give us an edge and open up avenues of growth for us in the Spanish speaking world. It’s an ideal location offering US Central Time zone coverage and near shore service capabilities,” said Arora, who was recognized as “Woman of Outstanding Leadership” by The International Womens Leadership Association (TIWLA).
Headquartered in California, UST Global has offices in the US, Britain, India, Malaysia, Philippines, Mexico, Denmark and Singapore. Its client-centric Global Engagement Model ensures 24/7 delivery of services through onshore, nearshore, and offshore centers. It offers consulting, tech build, application development, infrastructure, e-commerce, business intelligence, data management, social media solutions, and BPO services.
There is always this notion that IT service providers only write thousands of lines of code, but at UST they take inventing new things very seriously. The firm’s Apple Tree Lab encourages employees to spend part of their day in an “innovation gym,” developing user cases for new technologies. UST spots new opportunities for services by constantly looking for gaps between what it offers and what customers are asking for. Think of this as fill-in growth. A lot of ideas for new services come from the grassroots - its employees.
“We encourage our 12,000 employees to come up with new technologies and ways of doing things. Many of these ideas are spawned from what is driving our client’s business; others are solutions that help our employees, and our community,” said Arora.
“We are serious about innovation and ask our programmers and engineers to not only to break their head in solving a client’s problem but also break whatever they can to innovate at the innovation gym,” she added.
UST’s Trivandrum-based analyst Renjith Ramachandran’s app was selected by Nokia to be released in its Ovi Store. Similarly, Allen Thomas Varghese spent time innovating around Microsoft Kinect which can “see” every movement of your body and reproduce it within the video game you’re playing. Varghese has built a Formula 1 toy car which he can maneuver with simple hand movements. He is working on using the technology to help shoppers get better store information.
“We also played a substantial role for a Fortune 100 retailer, to execute their ideas around customer loyalty by building and deploying a mobile app. Not only did the application race to a million downloads, the positive impact on the client’s business continues to feature in the company’s annual report,” said Jim Hughes, Corporate Innovation Officer at UST Global.
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