Kochi: Finding experienced hands among Kerala’s IT talent is difficult, said Jyothis Joseph, associate director - international operations, Netrix , a US-based IT services company.

In India, the company has operations in Pune, Mumbai and Kochi. Among them, the company witnesses fastest growth in Pune where it has good talent pool. However, the talent acquisition cost in Pune is 35% higher than that of Kochi, he said.

A couple of years ago, Chicago-based Netrix LLC had made headlines in Kerala, when it acquired two Kochi-based IT companies, Ideamine Technologies and Empressem Technologies . Joseph was the founder of Ideamine and Empressem was set up by Joseph and his friend Ajeesh Kumar.

“Nearly 30% of the IT workforce in India is Malayalis and they hold senior positions in most of the software companies in Bangalore. However, very few are coming back to Kerala. Otherwise, in general, everybody wants to stick with Bangalore, Pune or Hyderabad, where they think they will get good opportunities or mainstream projects or good salaries,” Joseph said.

As cloud computing is helping companies to bring down capex, more and more firms are shifting to the new platform, which opens up new employment opportunities for Malayalis, Joseph said.

Netrix has demand for engineers in cloud computing, Cisco’s unified communications, Microsoft technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and DevOps, in Kerala. “You may get people with below five years’ experience here, but getting those in the 5 to 10 years range is difficult,” Joseph added.

To grow the IT industry in Kerala further, the government should lobby more, he noted. The slowdown in the local economy hasn’t affected IT companies as most of their clients are abroad and the earnings are in the US dollars where the conversion rate is high now, he added.

