Wipro IT – Realizing Opportunities

Wipro in my opinion has an extremely intriguing story. Mr. Girish Paranjpe, President of Finance Solutions, presented to us the company history of Wipro, which has managed to successfully transition from a consumer products company selling sunflower oil and laundry detergent to a highly respected global IT services provider.

Started in approximately 1947, Wipro focused on selling Indian consumer products for over 35 years. In roughly 1985, legal regulations passed by the Indian government required that all public companies operating in India have less than 51% of the company owned by individual shareholders, and subsequently large computer companies such as IBM immediately exited the country. As a result, an enormous number of Indian companies that had invested in computers were left with without any support network, creating an enormous gap in the market.

Capitalizing on this opportunity, Wipro quickly decided to focus on this new market and invested in an R&D team. This R&D team designed and developed new computers, including motherboards, operating systems, compilers and other required components. While there was an extensive installed base of clients, few other companies wanted to make the R&D investment required to enter this new market at the time. In Mr. Paranjpe’s words, “Wipro built its IT business from the ground up.”

Just a few years later in the early 1990s, in an effort to liberalize the economy, the Indian government removed the restrictions it had previously put in place and companies such as IBM and Compaq began to return to India. Wipro had a difficult decision to make – should they decide to face global competition despite their lack of global technologies, or should they shut down their IT business completely?

Wipro adapted their business model to a partnership strategy. Wipro continued to focus on their clients and the local support business, but decided not to make everything in house. Rather than build, they would import. Rather than produce, they would integrate. They would help their partners do research and development, and never put themselves into a position where they competed with their own clients.

By consistently focusing on quality and process, they have since become the vendor of choice for a number of large equipment vendors such as Alcatel and Nortel. They have grown from 300 to 15,000 employees, and continue to help their clients support their products throughout the product lifecycle.

In addition to their numerous awards for quality and process, Wipro has an amazing reputation as a preferred employer. In an industry that is many times considered a “sweat shop” industry, their BPO call center business was ranked number one to work for by their employees in the 2007 Hewitt survey. After touring their training facilities, I can definitely understand why. An entire section of the Wipro campus is dedicated to several large lecture halls. New hires are put through two months of training, and must pass competency tests on a number of subjects including cross-cultural understanding in order to continue their employment. Wipro also partners with a number of prestigious educational institutions to support employees who wish to work towards additional academic degrees on campus.

I was extremely impressed with Wipro’s ability to identify new opportunities, focus their investment, and successfully execute on their strategies. It seems to me that the most critical decisions that they made involved a significant element of risk in entering new markets or competing with much more established companies, and each time Wipro made the required investments in capital, technologies, and people to realize these opportunities. This visit to Wipro reinforced to me what I have learned through the many case studies and companies I have studied throughout my time at Santa Clara - that it is not just about correctly identifying an opportunity but rather how you focus, invest and execute on the opportunities that matter.

- Eileen McSweeney