Formation and early years In 1976, a group of eight engineers, all former employees of
Delhi Cloth & General Mills, led by
Shiv Nadar, started a company that would make personal computers. Initially floated as
Microcomp Limited, Nadar and his team (which also included Arjun Malhotra,
Ajai Chowdhry, D.S. Puri, Yogesh Vaidya and Subhash Arora) started selling teledigital calculators to gather capital for their main product. On 11 August 1976, the company was renamed Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL). HCL Enterprise developed an indigenous
microcomputer in 1978, and an
RDBMS,
networking OS and
client-server architecture in 1983. The company originally was focused on hardware but, via HCL Technologies, software and services became the main focus. On 12 November 1991, HCL Technologies was spun off as a separate unit, being incorporated as HCL Overseas Limited, a provider of software and technology development services. In July 1994, the company name was changed to HCL Consulting Limited. with an issue of 14.2 million shares. By the early-2000s, its wholly owned subsidiary HCL Comnet had expanded its offerings from
VSAT to include
network security and
IT infrastructure services. In 2001, HCL formed a joint venture with
Deutsche Bank by acquiring a 51% stake in the latter's Indian subsidiary Deutsche Software (later renamed DSL Software). In 2004, HCL bought out the remaining 49% stake in DSL Software, which then became part of HCL's
banking technology division. In 2003, HCL won a contract to develop
embedded software for
Airbus A340's flight warning system. That same year, HCL sold its entire stake in HCL Perot Systems, a seven-year old IT services company, to joint venture partner
Perot Systems for over $105 million. In 2005, HCL expanded its operations in Northern Ireland. At the 2006 UK Trade and Investment India Business Awards in New Delhi, the then UK Prime Minister
Tony Blair announced the expansion. In 2008, HCL acquired the UK-based consultancy
Axon Group for £440 million and merged HCL's
enterprise application services (EAS) division into Axon. In the three years following the acquisition, the EAS division's revenue share within HCL increased from 9% to 22%. In October 2017,
IBM and HCL announced a strategic partnership, with the latter taking over the development of IBM
Lotus Software's Notes, Domino, Sametime and Verse collaboration tools. HCL America acquired the remaining 19.6% stake in Actian for $100.2 million in 2021, making Actian the data & analytics division of HCLSoftware, but keeping it an independent company. In 2019, HCL Technologies acquired products of
IBM including
AppScan,
BigFix,
Commerce,
Connections, Digital Experience (
Portal and Content Manager),
Notes/Domino, and
Unica. In 2021, the company reached $10 billion in revenue. In 2022, HCL Technologies
rebranded as HCLTech. In 2023, HCLTech acquired ASAP Group, a German automotive engineering company for $279 million. In August 2023, HCLTech signed a $2.1 billion managed network services deal with
Verizon Business. In May 2024, HCLTech announced the acquisition of select assets of Communications Technology Group, a business division of
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), for $225 million. == Acquisitions ==