ZS expands India operations to serve life sciences GCCs

US based technology and management consulting company ZS has expanded its India operations to serve the increasing number of global pharmaceutical and life sciences companies that are establishing their global capability centres (GCC) in India.

The company, which has 70% of its employees based in India, has been helping the GCCs design their strategy. “About half (of the global) pharma companies have GCC in India now. We've been working with them closely. We opened our office in Hyderabad, which is growing very rapidly largely to serve, to leverage the talent there, and to work with the GCCs," Pratap Khedkar, CEO, ZS said.

Of the 3800 people ZS hired globally so far in 2025, bulk of the hiring happened in India. In an exclusive interaction with Fortune India, Khedkar said there are multiple stages of growth to the GCCs, and ZS offer end-to-end solutions. “There are types of things that we provide as services directly to the GCC. The first is we can help the GCC set up the operating model. Here, we leverage our own experience to do some strategy consulting to say what should your structure be, which capability you should transition first, and which should be later. How do you set it up? Do you set it up by business unit? Do you set it up by capability? Is it mostly horizontal? Should it be verticalized and integrated with the parent companies? What are the pros and cons of those kinds? So that's one piece of work,” he said.

The company also manages operations and trains the GCC staff if required. The company licenses out its proprietary software too and in that sense is a technology provider to GCCs.

“What we've done for a long time is data and analytics. So not just give you the strategy but will use data and analytics to give detailed tactical level insight. The third thing that we do is we can do the work using data and analytics to implement your strategy, but we can also build your capability. So about half our work is technology that is why we sit at that intersection of healthcare and technology,” he explains.

ZS has a consulting software division with about 1000 people, the majority of whom are in India. “We also sell software because many GCC will say things like, well, you can build a custom tech for us, but that's a lot of expense, custom tech is expensive, so can you give me a product that does what you used to do, I will train 500 people to use it. Just pay the license fees and we are off and running,” Khedkar said.

The company has offices in 40 cities around the world, but two third of its staff is based in India. “We were the original GCC, we went through this journey for 20 years and we have chosen a path which the GCCs should choose. GCCs can start off with the labour arbitrage idea, but soon you must think about decision making from India. Then you must think about innovation from India, the talent you need to get is not just for the first part, it is also for the second and third part, so your talent bar must be very different and you have to hire. India has tons of talent, so it's not difficult to find those people, but you have to agree that that is what you want to do from a mission perspective,” he adds.