A decade ago, Wipro was an anonymous conglomerate selling cooking oil and personal computers, mostly in India. Today, it is a $930 million-a-year global company, and most of its business comes from information-technology services. Since 1997, Wipro's revenue has grown by an average of 26% a year while profits have grown by 69%. (http://www.eetimes.com/pressreleases/bizwire/70192) Its 15,000 technologists write software, integrate back-office solutions, design semiconductors, debug applications, take orders, and field help calls for some of the biggest companies in the world. Wipro hosts development centers for Hewlett-Packard, GM, GE, and dozens of other huge global companies. They are as good at doing all of that as anyone in the world. And because they can take advantage of lower Indian wages they are cheaper than comparable American companies.
It is an irresistible force, and it's on the rise. Three years ago, Bangalore was the software world's biggest software body shop, offering coders at $2 an hour.
Wipro campus1
Wipro Floating learning Centre, Electronic City 2,...
English: Photograph of Suresh Vaswani. Taken at Wi...Now Wipro and a few rivals are moving upstream, swinging into such high-value services as consulting, integration, and architecture. Increasingly, Wipro is competing with Accenture, EDS, IBM, and the big accounting firms.
The competition, meanwhile, seems to have learned to respect Wipro and is taking a page from their success. Global tech-services firms have awakened to the new, low-cost, high-quality IT services India offers. Accenture, IBM, and Electronic Data Systems are moving into India aggressively. Together, the three companies have hired new staff over the past year and are renting prime office space in Bangalore and elsewhere. (http://www.satyam.com/homenews/documents/it2004_giga.pdf)
Wipro continues to meet the challenge of it competitors. New business will come, because domestic and international companies are looking to slash costs. For Wipro, it's all about turning that opportunity into an inflection point. It's about restructuring straightforward commodity work into high-value partnerships. It's...