Wipro: On A Change Grid

Wipro, india’s third largest software exporter by revenue, was established in 1945 as Western India Vegetable Products in Amalner, Maharashtra. Most of us know that Wipro is actually the acronym of that original avatar. In May, Wipro introduced a new brand identity and rearticulated its values. The year 2017 also marks the 70th anniversary of Wipro’s listing on the stock exchange.

Amid global political uncertainty impacting the IT services industry, in the fiscal year 2016-17, Wipro’s gross revenues grew by 7.4 per cent. “International Monetary Fund expects economic activity to pickup through 2017 in both advanced economies as well as the emerging markets, but pockets of weaknesses remain. Wipro faces this changing environment with optimism,” Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro said in a letter to the shareholders.  

It has been a little over a year since Wipro embarked on a transformation journey. “Our strategy is based on two themes — help our clients’ drive the future of their businesses (Change Strategy) and modernise the core of our clients’ business (Run Strategy),” Abidali Z. Neemuchwalla (in pic), CEO of Wipro said in the annual report of 2016-17.  

In FY17, Wipro also set up a dedicated unit to drive non-linear revenues through investments in intellectual property in the form of products, platforms, frameworks and solutions. This has led to an increase in patents that we hold. In the last fiscal, the number of patents we held (and applied for) increased by over 50 per cent to 1,662.  

In the automation and IP space, Wipro is scaling up the deployment of its artificial intelligence (AI) platform ‘Holmes’ across clients. Holmes is a focused initiative for Wipro to improve not only the delivery productivity, but also drive a new way to work as we foresee cognitive and robotic process automation (RPA) drastically changing the traditional IT delivery model. “In FY17, we generated productivity worth over 12,000 persons across 140-plus customer engagements by leveraging next generation delivery practices and deploying over 1,800 cumulative instances of Holmes bots in the areas of application development, maintenance and infrastructure services,” Wipro said in its annual report.

During FY17, Wipro also sharpened its focus on localisation in all its key markets. In the US, it invested significantly in acquiring capabilities, increased hiring, and set up delivery centres. Wipro added two more major multi-client delivery centres in Mountain View, California and Farmington Hills, Michigan. As a result, during the year, over 3,000 local employees joined Wipro in the US and today, Wipro has a workforce of over 14,000 in the US.

“We are driving increased localisation and expect to have a majority of our US workforce as local employees soon. Similarly, we are making good progress on localisation initiatives in the UK, Singapore, Middle East and other parts of the world,” Neemuchwala said in his letter to the company’s stakeholders.  

Wipro earns its respect both from its performance and the values it stands for as a company. It has a corporation wide Code of Business Conduct (COBC) that provides the broad direction as well as specific guidelines for all business transactions. The COBC is the central document on which the company’s ethics compliance message is disseminated to all employees.