20,000-plus people shift as IT firms buy GCC, captive tech carve-outs

New Delhi: More than 20,000 employees have moved from global capability centres (GCCs), enterprise information technology subsidiaries and product operations to IT services providers in the past 12 months, as companies shift parts of their technology operations to external providers, according to industry estimates.

TCS’s takeover of Best Buy’s India GCC under a multiyear deal is the latest example, while HCLTech’s $10.5-million acquisition of Guardian Life’s India operations brought nearly 2,000 employees into the company under a seven-year partnership, while Wipro’s $386-million acquisition of Olam Group’s IT and digital services business Mindsprint, which has more than 3,200 employees, is tied to an eight-year strategic transformation deal.

Industry watchers expect the trend to continue as IT companies look for such takeover opportunities.


“We expect similar numbers in the next 12 months,” said Pareekh Jain, chief executive of EIIRTrend, a market research firm.

The 20,000-plus figure for the past 12 months covers more than pure GCC transfers.

Jain estimates around 3,000 people were part of pure GCC transitions, with the rest coming from combinations of GCCs, internal operations, third-party services, enterprise IT subsidiaries and product carve-outs. He estimates the broader pool of transactions at $1.3-1.5 billion in business value.

In a low-growth environment, IT service providers are aggressively chasing business acquisitions, he said.

HFS Research has tracked around half a dozen publicly disclosed GCC and captive-originated business transfers to service providers globally over the past 18 months.

“The transaction structures vary, but the pace has picked up noticeably in 2026,” said Achyuta Ghosh, India and global GCC practice head at HFS.

The shift is not limited to entire GCCs changing hands. Companies are also moving individual technology functions to service providers without selling the GCC itself.

“There is a much longer tail of quieter transactions where testing, infrastructure, application maintenance or other service towers move from a GCC to a provider without the legal entity itself being sold,” Ghosh said.

These transactions are rarely announced publicly, but are coming up more frequently in conversations with GCC leaders and service providers, he added.

Jain said some captive operations are becoming harder for companies to justify when they cannot achieve enough scale.

“Many GCCs are not able to achieve scale and make economic sense for enterprises to transition them to IT service providers, which can transform them with AI,” he said. Enterprises can then use those capabilities through service providers across other clients, he added.

Ghosh estimates around 10% of mature GCCs could become candidates for some form of full or partial transfer over the next two to three years. He expects the opportunity to be concentrated in GCCs focused on operational and labour-intensive work.

“GCCs are increasingly diverging into two groups,” he said. “One is focused on scale, domain execution, operations, application support, and other labour-intensive services. The other is focused on product ownership, engineering, data, AI, platforms and enterprise decision-making... The carve-out opportunity is concentrated in the first group.”

The transactions normally involve between 500 to 3,000 employees, Ghosh said.

For a 1,000-2,000-person GCC transfer, he expects roughly $25-70 million in annual contract value, depending on the work mix, location, the degree of transformation involved, and the extent to which AI-led productivity is built into the commercial model.

The value of these deals can also come through long-term services contracts rather than the acquisition itself.

Wipro’s Mindsprint engagement, for instance, is expected to generate more than $1 billion over eight years.

The trend is also extending to product companies reassessing which technology capabilities they want to retain.

“Product companies are looking to rationalise their product portfolios and are willing to carve out less strategic product lines to Service Providers while concentrating their resources on more strategic product lines,” Jain said.