Our Pune centre is Roche’s only 100% digital CoE globally: Raja Jamalamadaka, Roche Digital Center of Excellence India

In this exclusive conversation with Express Computer, Raja Jamalamadaka, Managing Director, Roche Digital Center of Excellence India, delves into how the company’s India operations, centred around its rapidly growing digital hub in Pune, are at the forefront of Roche’s global digital health transformation. From building AI-powered diagnostics to advancing predictive and personalised healthcare, the India GCC has evolved from a startup acquisition to becoming Roche’s only 100% digital CoE.

Roche India has rapidly scaled its presence, particularly with the new Pune facility, emerging as a global hub for data, AI, cloud, and software innovation. Could you walk us through the vision behind setting up Roche’s India GCC and how its mandate has evolved over time in contributing to Roche’s global digital health transformation?

Our digital centre in Pune is an outcome of acquiring a San Francisco-based startup that had its engineering CoE in Pune. Roche acquired this startup for specific products that addressed our immediate needs. After these products were absorbed into the Roche portfolio, we proposed converting the startup into a full-fledged digital CoE. At that time, Roche didn’t have any digital footprint in India, so it was a perfect fit. The products were already built, the team had been in place for a few years, and the engineering skills across the entire value chain, from product ownership to execution, were already present.

This was the starting point, but we decided to move beyond merely being a cost-saving organisation. While cost-benefit is undeniably important, we aimed to move up the value chain by focusing on execution. We began executing engineering projects, which was the core strength of the original startup. This is where Roche Information Solutions, Roche Diagnostic Solutions R&D, and Roche Informatics all established operations.

Two years into this journey, we moved even further up the value chain into the innovation space. Our goal was not just to execute but also to be innovative in our ways of working, ensuring our contributions differentiated Roche and provided a competitive advantage. The centre quickly transformed into a very important R&D and engineering hub for Roche.

So, it’s been an evolution from a startup to full-value chain execution, and now to innovation. Today, the Pune centre is Roche’s largest single footprint in India, with about 600 full-time employees, not including contractors and consultants. The facility itself has nearly double that seating capacity, indicating our future growth plans. We also have smaller shared services units in Hyderabad and Chennai, which handle analytics and related work, as part of this broader digital centre. This journey reflects a progressive movement up the value chain in terms of headcount, geographical footprint, and innovation.

What strategic role does the India GCC play today within Roche’s global operations, particularly in accelerating the shift from traditional healthcare to predictive, personalised, and patient-centric models?

Our Pune site is one of Roche’s global engineering centres, alongside others in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia Pacific like Malaysia. What makes Pune unique is that it is Roche’s only 100% digital CoE. We don’t handle commercial affiliates or manufacturing here; everything we do is directly or indirectly linked to digital, encompassing information solutions, diagnostic solutions, and informatics.

The value it contributes to the parent organisation stems from several factors. Having various digital units co-located in Pune fosters a unique level of collaboration and synergy in innovation; while teams may report globally, their physical proximity encourages cross-functional work, leading to everything from basic hackathons to advanced patent filings. A major reason for setting up a digital centre in India, including for Roche, is to tap into India’s rich ecosystem. This isn’t just about the sheer quantity and quality of engineering talent, but also the presence of a mature ecosystem comprising startups, trade bodies like NASSCOM , accelerators, other GCCs, services companies, and consulting firms. This mature ecosystem allows us to leverage partnerships, provide and receive consulting support, and engage in research collaborations, such as our ongoing partnership with IIT Madras. This interconnectedness makes India a compelling value proposition for GCCs and for Roche.

Regarding the shift towards predictive, personalised healthcare, our digital products primarily operate in the diagnostic space. So, the Pune centre is at the very foundation of this shift, adding immense value to Roche as an organisation and contributing to the Indian ecosystem.

With intensifying regulatory oversight, how is your India Centre building resilience and agility into regulatory functions like cybersecurity, data governance, and digital waste? What frameworks or practices have been key to this transformation?

The topics you mentioned are the very bedrock of our operations, as you can’t conduct any work in the heavily regulated healthcare space without robust compliance and audit practices.

Our key frameworks and practices include a dedicated Compliance Officer specifically trained in Roche’s digital space whose role involves preventive activities, curative measures, and fostering a strong culture of compliance as a natural habit within the organisation. We also hold numerous certifications such as HIPAA, SOC 2, and Software as a Medical Device related certifications. These instil rigor in our processes and help build a compliance-driven culture over time, as our ways of working must align with these standards for continuous renewal. Beyond compliance, we have a full-fledged Quality and Regulatory unit on-site. This team focuses on ensuring that relevant product changes are identified and implemented not just as a tick-box exercise, but because it’s the right thing to do, embedding this mindset into our culture. Also, our Product Security and Privacy Operations organisation based in Pune specifically addresses aspects like cybersecurity and data security. As a European company, we’re highly focused on GDPR compliance, which covers crucial aspects of data privacy, a critical area of focus for our compliance officer.

This combination of stringent compliance, relevant certifications, dedicated quality and regulatory functions, periodic audits, and a relentless effort to build the right culture provides the bedrock for our operations, enabling us to perform critical work in the highly regulated healthcare industry.

In a recent industry summit, you emphasised five ‘P’s. How is Roche’s India Centre bringing these principles to life, especially through AI data platforms and digital diagnostics, and what early impact are you seeing on patient care or lab performance globally?

The five ‘P’s are a simple framework to summarise how we add value to the organisation, helping us focus amidst numerous priorities. These five ‘P’s represent key value pillars for improving healthcare:

1. Prevent: Having the ability to prevent sickness before it strikes.
2. Predict: Using algorithms and tools to predict future health outcomes as much as possible.
3. Personalise: Ensuring that medicine and care are tailored to individual needs
4. Peace of mind: Establishing a comprehensive system for overall well-being, including mental health support.
5. Point of care: Ensuring healthcare services are available where people receive care, including in their homes, not just in hospitals or research facilities.

Our India digital centre is instrumental in building products that align with this 5P model. For example, our products operating in the laboratory space are designed to extract and anonymise data, ensuring compliance with data regulations, and then generate the right kind of analytics. This information empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions that support the 5P framework.

So, the centre forms the foundation for these efforts, contributing significant value to Roche globally and reinforcing our commitment to both the parent organisation and the Indian ecosystem.

Roche has expressed interest in co-innovation with the Indian academic and research ecosystem. Can you elaborate on your partnerships and collaborations in this domain?

We engage in quite a bit of collaboration with academic institutions. We work with universities like COEP in Pune, where our site is located. We organise panel discussions on critical healthcare topics, bringing industry insights to engineering and research students. This ensures academia stays current with industry trends, as they cannot survive in isolation.

We have a partnership with the IIT Madras in Chennai, focusing on responsible AI or ethical AI. This is a crucial area because while AI offers immense benefits, if unregulated or if ethical aspects are not considered, it can lead to significant risks, such as data privacy breaches . Our site experts are actively involved in this research.

While we primarily hire experienced professionals rather than directly from institutes, these experienced individuals often originate from these academic institutions. We also have an internship program in Hyderabad and Chennai, working with institutes to develop talent. As a GCC, we have a responsibility to contribute to developing the talent pool available from academic institutes over time.

This combination of thought leadership, research collaborations, and talent development through internships defines our serious and expanding relationship with academic institutions.

India has a vast talent pool, with around 1700 GCCs employing approximately 4.2 million people. What is Roche India’s policy or approach to attracting and retaining this talent?

Attracting talent for Roche in India is a relatively straightforward process. . Roche hasn’t had a direct challenge in hiring talent and some of our staff members have worked on Roche products and solutions through our service partners over the years before moving to us. When they get the opportunity to work directly for Roche, it’s a completely different experience. They become part of the company’s system, understand the bigger picture, and see how their code directly contributes to saving patient lives. This message, that they “code for life.” is a powerful clarion call that attracts the right talent.

Additionally, the Roche brand itself, with its 125-year history as a highly respectable institution at the forefront of developing valuable drugs, instills immense pride in affiliation. This brand quality plays a significant role in attracting top talent. In our four years of direct operations, we haven’t faced significant challenges in attracting talent at the desired pace and level, which has enabled our growth across three cities.

Regarding retention, several factors are at play, building on what I just mentioned. Knowing their work contributes to saving patient lives and improving quality of life is a powerful motivator that keeps people engaged and enthusiastic within the organisation. Our Pune facility, designed as a world-class innovation centre, thoughtfully caters to diverse individuals, introverts, extroverts, different age groups, and genders, and this inclusive design significantly contributes to employee satisfaction. While purpose and environment are crucial, we also provide industry-benchmarked competitive benefits to our employees.

The combination of meaningful work, a strong sense of purpose aligning with Roche’s mission, and competitive benefits plays a major role in retaining our talent. Our attrition rates are in single digits, significantly lower than the industry’s double-digit averages. We are proud that our attrition is less than one-fourth of the industry average. These factors have been at the forefront of our success in both attracting and retaining top talent.