Raja Jamalamadaka, Managing Director, Roche Digital Centre Of Excellence, India
Image: Madhu Kapparath
The history of Roche’s GCC in India, which includes a digital centre of excellence, traces back to a startup, Raja Jamalamadaka, managing director, Roche Digital Centre of Excellence, India, tells Forbes India.
Roche had acquired a San Francisco startup which was doing promising work in the area of health care software product development, with an engineering team in Pune. Jamalamadaka was the head of India operations and a core member of the global leadership team at the startup when it was acquired.
Towards the end of 2020, the erstwhile entrepreneurs who’d stayed on proposed to the Swiss multinational parent that it consider converting the former startup into a GCC, instead of only focusing on the couple of products it had made the acquisition for.
This all helped what’s today Roche’s 515-person GCC to be seeded as a centre of excellence, focussed on innovation, right from the beginning and it was never simply a cost play, Jamalamadaka says.
Having started with some 35 employees of the acquired startup, today the site comprises co-located teams of Roche Information Solutions, Roche Diagnostics R&D, Informatics and Diabetes Care Digital Engineering team, according to a note from the company. The employees include software engineers, developers, development architects, UI designers, data scientists, and data analytics engineers.
And the centre is generating innovation across three buckets, the GCC head says: Incremental, a lab automation room for example, adjacent, such as work that generates patents and third, even disruptive innovation.
Team members from the Pune site have been part of global teams that have filed five patents and developed six algorithms so far, according to the note.
In addition to the main Pune site, the India GCC has two satellite centres in Hyderabad and Chennai with about 70 employees each. An additional 200 or so contract staff are also expected to be converted to full-time employees as vacancies open up.
Of the four teams represented within the India GCC today, Roche Information Solutions builds customer or consumer-facing products. Roche Informatics, which was started in 2023, builds products that are used within Roche’s organisation, including in areas such as finance and HR, and other tools and solutions that support the customer-facing team, helping it build the external products.
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A third team is part of product development focussed on diabetes. The fourth is Diagnostics Solutions, which works on related hardware. The satellite teams in Hyderabad and Chennai provide shared services, or global business services, to the parent organisation. They offer analytics and automation for the internal ‘value chain’ of the company.
“So having started with pure-play engineering, today we are end-to-end,” Jamalamadaka says. “And we play a powerful role in ‘platformising’ some of our products.”
Typically, these platforms play a role in automating various recurring tasks. A good example would be one that’s helping Roche to pull together data from multiple sources, cleaning and anonymising it and preparing it in a manner that allows business applications built on top to get the appropriate data.
“This gene pool shows this trend,” for example, he says.
And what’s noteworthy is that all the stakeholders such as the product owners, the ‘scrum masters’, the agile coaches, developers, testers, and so on “we have all of them co-located to be able to make product decisions right here in India”, the GCC head says.
“We can empower the team to take decisions and impact the course of the product. That’s what makes us a true innovation centre,” he adds.
Over the course of his close-to-30 years in the industry, Jamalamadaka has helped build two other GCCs before Roche’s India centre, and he is also currently on the boards of directors and works as a mentor to other GCCs in India.
With an eye to the future, GCCs that want to evolve as strong centres of innovation will find leaders that aren’t necessarily domain experts, but are expert at bringing together a diverse set of people who can collectively deliver path-breaking work, he says.
And he sees the ecosystem in India deepening on this front, with organisations such as Roche’s India centre expanding and strengthening their industry partnerships.
(This story appears in the 21 February, 2025 issue
of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
