/ GCC & Captive Operations
GCC Setup: Your Team. Your Operating Model. Offshore.
A captive delivery center stood up and run like a first-party team, not an outsourcing contract. Entity, hiring, facilities, and operating model in one engagement, with a build-operate-transfer path onto your payroll when you are ready.
- India and LatAm
- Entity to operating model
- Build-operate-transfer
- One statement of work
First pod live in 90 days
Entity, hiring, and a documented transfer path.
Your team, your IP
A captive gives you the team,
the IP, and the keys.
Your entity, your employees, your leadership from week one, with us running the plumbing until the handover. Knowledge compounds on your side of the wall, and after the transfer everything from the codebase to the culture belongs to you.
53Countries on one data platform
One global operating model serving 400,000 employees
Read the case study
/ What we stand up
One engagement. Six workstreams.
Everything the captive needs to feel like your team on day one.
01
Feasibility & site selection
Honest read on whether a captive center makes sense, where to put it, and what it will cost over three years. Written so a CFO can sign it.
Site comparisonThree-year TCOTalent-pool depth report
02
Entity & compliance
Legal entity setup, tax registrations, labour compliance, and the STPI or SEZ paperwork when the benefits are worth it. Your lawyers still sign; we do the legwork.
Incorporated entityTax and labour registrationsSEZ / STPI filing
03
Talent pipeline
Hiring partners vetted on your role profiles, not on generic JDs. Assessment workflow owned by your engineering leaders, calibrated against offers they have made before. Offer-to-join above 80%, first pod staffed in 60 days.
Role definitionsHiring funnel SLAsCalibrated assessment rubrics
04
Facilities & ops
Office fit-out, access control, BCP, and the mundane logistics that decide whether engineers show up the second month. Leased or coworking to match the ramp.
Fit-out planBCP + access policyVendor contracts
05
IT & security
Network, endpoints, identity, and the SOC integration that lets the center operate on your trust perimeter from day one. Your identity provider, your policies, no orphan environment.
Network + endpoint buildIAM integrationSOC onboarding
06
Operating model
Leadership hire sequencing, reporting lines back to HQ, cadences, metrics, and the cultural work that keeps the captive feeling like one team, not a remote vendor.
Org designReporting + cadence playbookCulture plan
/ The lifecycle
Build. Operate. Transfer.
The three phases are in the original contract, including the transfer terms.
01
Build
Month 0 to 6
Entity, first leadership hires, facilities, and IT go live. First pod in production on a real workstream, not training exercises.
02
Operate
Month 6 to 24
Scale to target headcount. We run HR, payroll, admin, and compliance while your leadership owns delivery. Monthly reporting to HQ on fixed metrics.
03
Transfer
Month 24 onwards
Pre-negotiated transfer of the entity and payroll to you, on a timeline written into the original contract. No renegotiation at the finish line.
/ Where
Where we stand captives up.
Location is a function of talent depth, time-zone fit, and cost, not a preference.
Hyderabad, India
Strengths
Deep engineering talent, mature GCC ecosystem, strong SEZ/STPI incentives.
Best suited for
Data, AI, platform engineering, 24x7 operations.
Bengaluru, India
Strengths
Product engineering density, the deepest leadership talent pool in India.
Best suited for
Application engineering, platform, senior architecture roles.
Pune, India
Strengths
Strong enterprise-app talent, lower attrition than tier-one metros.
Best suited for
ERP, enterprise applications, managed services.
LatAm (Mexico / Costa Rica / Colombia)
Strengths
Time-zone alignment with US hours, bilingual talent.
Best suited for
Near-shore pods, support centers, product engineering for US customers.
Rough sizing heuristic: forty engineers is the floor below which an entity costs more than it saves. Above two hundred, a captive is almost always the right answer on a three-year horizon.
Need the coverage before the captive?
A captive pays off at scale, and plenty of estates need 24/7 coverage long before the headcount justifies an entity. Our managed NOC and SOC run the same follow the sun model under published SLAs, on the platforms you already operate. Some clients start there and stand the captive up once the case is obvious.
Managed Operations/ Why ACI
Why a captive, run by us
The plumbing stays with us so your leadership keeps product focus.
/ A captive, not an outsourcing contract
The engineers report to your leadership from week one.
We run the plumbing so your people can focus on the work, not the logistics.
/ Transfer terms written up front
The BOT transfer price, conditions, and timeline are in the original statement of work.
Not a second negotiation when you have the most to lose.
/ Delivery pod as reference architecture
The first pod runs on our engineering practices for data, AI, and cloud, so you see the operating model in action before scaling it.
/ Optional, not compulsory, transfer
If you decide to keep the operate model long term, the contract stays in place.
The transfer option never expires, and we do not push it.
/ Questions
Captive questions,
answered straight.
Scope a captive center and get a three-year TCO and a ninety-day plan to first pod live.
How is this different from staff augmentation or a managed-services contract?
Staff augmentation rents individuals. Managed services rents outcomes against a defined scope. A captive is your own legal entity, your own employees, and your own leadership, operated by us while it scales. The difference shows up at year three, when the staff-aug body shop has churned twice and the captive still has the same tech leads running the same platforms.
Why not set up the captive ourselves?
Many enterprises do, and several succeed. The trade-off is that the first twelve months consume senior leadership attention that would otherwise sit on product work. Firms come to us when they want the entity, hiring, and operating model delivered on a timeline, with contractual commitments around when the first pod goes live.
How quickly can we get a pod live?
Ninety days from signed engagement to first engineering pod running on a real workstream. That assumes standard Indian entity setup; BOT-style entity transfers add two to three weeks. Offer-to-join timelines for senior roles can extend the ramp for the second and third pods.
What headcount does a captive make sense at?
Forty engineers is the rough floor below which the operating cost of an entity starts to exceed the savings. Below that, a managed-services contract or near-shore staff-aug pod is usually cleaner. Above two hundred engineers, a captive is almost always the right answer on a three-year horizon.
How is the BOT transfer priced?
The transfer consideration is negotiated into the original statement of work as a pre-agreed formula, typically a function of headcount and entity valuation at the transfer date. We do not believe in discovering the transfer price when the client has least leverage.
Can you operate only part of the captive and leave the rest to us?
Yes. The most common split is: we run HR, payroll, facilities, and compliance; you run delivery, engineering leadership, and the technical roadmap. That split holds for as long as you want it to.
