Why Infosys’ Investment in the U.S. Starts with Indiana

Infosys is building the future of tech in the heart of America. Our U.S. Education Center in Indianapolis will be the launch pad for building new skills and capabilities across the spectrum of digital technologies for our clients all around the country.

Indiana Secretary of Commerce Jim Schellinger and I recently had a conversation about our journey to our announcement in Indianapolis. In 2016, Jim had the chance to view the blueprint for our U.S. Education Center: Infosys’ global education facility in Mysore, India—the largest corporate university in the world. “I first saw the Mysore campus in March 2017, and I thought ‘I have never seen anything like this in my life’,” Jim said. When Jim and I came back from India, we started drawing up an incredible vision: an education center in Indiana to benefit Hoosiers and workers from all around the country right at the crossroads of America.

Jim is an architect by trade, and he remembered how exciting it was to see the campus, the students, the activity and how hard they were working during that first visit: “A building that can train 13,000 people at the same time was just fascinating to me,” Jim recalled.

Running the world’s largest corporate university is no small undertaking, but the simple truth is that Infosys is built on education and learning.

The U.S. Education Center will strengthen our ability to create the future capabilities our clients need to stay relevant and compete in Indiana and across the U.S. It will enable us to train and reskill our new hires—whether they are experienced professionals or recent graduates. And it will allow us to hire extraordinary people across the United States, no matter their technical background.

When we announced our campaign to boost American innovation alongside Jim and Governor Holcomb last May, and our commitment to hire 10,000 Americans, we weren’t just focused on hiring seasoned IT professionals and people with existing high-tech skills. Infosys also looks to hire talent from unconventional backgrounds such as liberal arts. Liberal arts can play a very important role in designing new systems and new processes as the digital world must be inspired by life, by humanity.

Indiana is a great place for Infosys to put down roots.

Indiana is surrounded by an incredible academic ecosystem, is home to a great cluster of our clients, is centrally located and able to provide our employees with a great cost of living and quality of life. While we started off with a commitment to establish a single Technology and Innovation Hub and create 2,000 jobs here, the chemistry we built with everyone in the state gave us the confidence to think bigger together.

Jim’s enthusiasm about Indiana’s pro-business climate certainly helped seal the deal for us—that and his reminders that Indiana is “at the true crossroads of America—just a 12-hour drive from 65% of the U.S. population and #1 in manufacturing.”

Infosys is lucky to have such tremendous partners in Jim, Governor Holcomb, and the State of Indiana—and we still have a lot of work to do together. Jim told me that he is always thinking about the next big idea, and Infosys’ partnership with Indiana “is critical to closing the skills gap and creating high-tech job opportunities in Indiana.” The reason Jim took on the job of Secretary of Commerce, he said, “was to help people learn and make a good living—and who can do that better than Infosys?” In Jim’s words, “We’ve done great work together so far and have even more to accomplish after today.”

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, this is just the beginning.