HCL Technologies Ltd. has partnered with Cisco to establish a South Africa Global Centre of Excellent GCoE in Johannesburg which will serve as a local support center for HCL and Cisco''s South African clients. It will also train local engineers on advanced Cisco technologies to support clients across Africa and specifically South Africa.

The GCoE will be aligned with the India hub to address skills shortage for advanced technologies in both regions. It 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 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, it said.

Besides, the centre will support a number of vertical sectors, including Telecom Service Providers, BFSI, the Public Sector and the Retail & Mining industry and joins existing GCoE’s in the US and EU n running dedicated recruitment and training programs for college graduates.

Ashish Gupta, Senior Vice President and Head - EMEA, HCL Infrastructure Services Division, HCL Technologies said: “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.’’

A pilot programme running at centers in Seattle WA and Cary North Carolina in the US, Helsinki in Finland, Krakow in Poland, Dublin in Ireland, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Dubai in UAE and Singapore already provided a platform for developing IT skill pool in local communities through collaboration with anchor customers and universities, the company said.