Leading global IT services provider HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCL) has set up a South Africa Glocal Centre of Excellence (GCoE) in Johannesburg, as part of its commitment to building a socially responsible business.

HCL is collaborating closely with Cisco to develop the curricula for the centre, which will train local engineers on advanced Cisco technologies to support clients across Africa, and more specifically South Africa.

HCL's already established Global Cisco Hub in India has over 15 years' experience in creating engineering talent in advanced technologies.

The Johannesburg GCoE which is also operated by HCL, will align with the India hub to address the skills shortage for advanced technologies in both regions. HCL has already trained an initial batch of 26 local engineers who are already deployed on key projects in five regional hubs across South Africa, with plans to train 100 engineers at the centre over next 12 months.

The launch of the South Africa Hub capitalizes on HCL's core strength in training large numbers of engineers and will see this strategy expanded further and rolled out on a wider base.

The GCoE will serve customers either directly and indirectly through HCL's partner network throughout Africa, It will also service clients by developing ICT skill sets thus ultimately creating trained local personnel to deploy and manage advanced solutions.

The centre will support a number of vertical sectors including Service Providers, BFSI, the Public Sector , Retail and Mining industry, and joins existing GCoEs in the US and EU in running dedicated recruitment and training programs for college graduates. A pilot programme running at centers in Seattle, WA and Cary, NC in the US, Helsinki in Finland, Krakow in Poland and Dublin in Ireland has already provided a platform for developing IT skill pool in local communities through collaboration with anchor customers and universities.

"As more and more companies in the west look for new avenues of growth we are increasingly seeing a large demand for leading edge IT solutions coming in from emerging markets like Africa. The Johannesburg Glocal Center of Excellence is an important part of our strategy in the way we plan to serve our customers and partners throughout Africa and underlines our core philosophy of creating talent pools in the markets we operate to manage advanced technology solutions which can help our customers take advantage of the latest technologies for their business”, said Ashish Gupta, senior vice president and head, EMEA, HCL ISD, HCL Technologies.

Stefano Mattiello, director, Channels for Cisco South Africa said, "South Africa offers many unique advantages for customer services support and also aligns with Cisco's focus to partner with emerging countries in order to create innovative and inclusive business models enabled by technology. We choose to collaborate with HCL in South Africa because of its innovative, world-class support services. The centers of excellence we operate help us provide a global reach through the use of technology. We lead in the way of adopting Web 2.0 tools that allow us to work virtually and do business anytime, anywhere, with high levels of operational efficiency."