Azim Premji is often ribbed about how he inherited a $2 million hydrogenated cooking fat company from his father in 1966 and took it out of the service of Indian cuisine and into the service of Western companies hungry for software.

Since then Bangalore-based Wipro has grown into India’s number three IT services company, with annual revenues heading for $2.5 billion and 60,000 employees.

Wipro is the company that understood early on that India was about more than labour arbitrage. Under Premji’s leadership, the company was an early pioneer of software quality, having foreseen that Indian companies would need formal approaches to quality if they were to convince customers in the US and Europe of their abilities. As such, Wipro was the first company to embrace the Six Sigma approach to process improving and defect elimination and the first IT services company in the world to achieve SEI CMMi Level 5 (in June 1999), the highest assessment of software development processes.

The quest for quality is also reflected in the company’s focus on training. Even as it has started to spread its development centres around the globe, it has recently decided to do the opposite with its training facilities. With the aim of delivering consistency of services no matter the location, it is bringing together its five training centres into one major centre for induction.

The bulk of that quality control is still focused on its core activity of application development and maintenance, but it has been diversifying faster than many of its competitors. For example, it is the largest provider of business process outsource services of any Indian company, says Premji.

In terms of geographical targets for its services, the US dominates, generating 48% of its revenues. But Europe is a major source of business, producing around 24% of its revenues, as is India itself, with 22% – the highest percentage of any top 20 company.

The company is also building capacity in locations outside of India – including a development centre in Budapest that it intends to ramp up which will quickly, says Premji, provide it with the language skills to service continental European clients.

Wipro is more acquisitive than many of its rivals. It dived into call centre services with its 2002 $100 million acquisition of India’s Spectramind, and since 2005, it has bought seven companies outside of India,  including infrastructure management provider cMango, design services company NewLogic and Nervewire, an IT consulting outfit. And as part of its on-going expansion strategy into new areas such as infrastructure management,  it says it intends to buy a European IT support provider by the end of its fiscal year in March – at a price of up to $250 million.

More from this feature... 

Overview

Out of India - Who's best placed to exploit the world's biggest pool of low-cost, highly skilled IT service labour.

From East To West

• Tata Consultancy Services
• Infosys
• Wipro
• Satyam
• HCL
• Patni
• MindTree Consulting
  

From West To East

• IBM
• Cognizant
• Accenture
• HP Services
• EDS
• Capgemini