Jeff Green, senior vice-president, engineering, of the US-based cybersecurity firm, is credited with setting up four different GCCs in Bengaluru in the last 24 years, all by bootstrapping and leveraging personal connections. This week, he set up the fourth GCC in the city, this time for the cyber security firm, Arctic Wolf, and once again, he says he did this without taking any third-party help.
Over the last 24 years, Green has seen the evolution of talent in India’s tech capital. The other three GCCs where he played a significant role are Sophos, McAfee and Pulse Secure, the latter being a spin-off of Juniper Network, for which they built a team in Bengaluru from scratch, Green says.
“The last GCC we started was for Sophos with a team of 30 engineers. It was close to 300 by the time I left that company,” he adds.
But while Sophos went from 30 to 300 employees in five years, Pulse Secure scaled up 2X in two years in his tenure. Similarly, he saw McAfee scaling up from 100 to 2,000 employees in 10 years.
“When we started off at McAfee, we were looking at staff augmentation. [Today] We’ve moved to almost all the other companies I mentioned, including McAfee, to a sort of product ownership. So, everything for the product is done and built in India,” he explains.
Discover the stories of your interest
In short, what he means is that the talent requirement for GCCs in India has climbed up the value chain from staff augmentation to AI skills in the last two decades.Commenting about the key takeaways from these years of experience, he says, “It’s really important to hire well when you hire the seed team. What I mean by the seed team is the managerial leadership and the technical leadership. Because that sets the tone for the rest of the organisation as you scale and grow it out. So, I think that getting that talent up front [will help] because, rock stars attract rock stars.”
Also Read: Tier-2, 3 cities make a small dent in Bengaluru’s GCC growth story
Partner roles
Devendra Rath, vice-president, engineering, Arctic Wolf, has been one of the first few employees of this India GCC. His relationship with Green goes back to their McAfee days in the 2000s.
Green travels to India three to four times in a year, and Rath says that every time he reaches Bengaluru, his phone buzzes with messages from cyber security buffs along the city’s Outer Ring Road area.
These people long to meet, work and share knowledge with Green. Without giving out numbers, Green agrees that he himself must have interviewed candidates numbering in the 100s in India.
When asked what changes he has seen in terms of cost of talent in India in these two decades, he says that the cost of a resource in the US versus the cost in India used to be around 1:4, i.e. employing a single employee in the US was similar to four engineers in India in the early 2000s.
Today, as knowledge and talent move up the value chain and people do more product-related work, the cost of high-level roles like distinguished engineers in India is comparable to other geographies of the world. So, it might be 10-20% lower than other places.
“When you get down to generic engineers, this ratio has changed to 1:2 at the lower mid-level employees,” he says, adding that at the bottom entry level, it is at 1:3 when compared to the US.
To a question on the importance of having your own GCC compared to having it on a BOT (build, operate and transfer) model, Green explained, that the right kind of culture apart from developing the standard and passion for what a company does, can’t come in through a BOT model.
About the opening of the recent Arctic Wolf GCC, he said that they are planning to hire over 150 employees by the end of this fiscal. On the scale-up plans, Green says that he expects Bengaluru to become the largest R&D and AI centre globally for the company by the end of the second year of its operation.
Also Read: The rise of the GCC ecosystem in India
