Newly appointed CEO Abidali Z Neemuchwala has outlined a six-pronged strategy in a bid to get the company back on the growth path, alongside its peers.
Addressing reporters, the CEO of the third largest exporter outlined his strategy of aligning some business practices such as consulting with digital, as clients are increasingly looking to spend more in that area.
“With this approach of combining consulting with digital practice, we can secure mindshare amongst existing and new customers,” he said.
Wipro, had a few months back acquired Designit, a digital start-up company in Europe, which designs user interface and counts Audi, NTT Data and Samsung as some of its clients.
So far this has started yielding results. In the fourth quarter, it won seven joint deals in digital business. Wipro is also arming its employees with these kinds of skill-set and as a part of the programme, it has trained 10,000 employees in digital technologies and plans to cover another 20,000 employees.
Second, Neemuchwala plans to focus on client mining, an area former CEO TK Kurien had mixed success in. The company has set up an integrated services unit with a mandate of integrating technology solutions from different service lines, the CEO said. Further, it has launched a programme called Addroit, designed for delivery managers, which is aimed at covering 900 managers.
Analysts believe that this will help the company in scaling up large accounts. According to Dipen Shah, Senior Vice-President and Head of Private Client Group Research, Kotak Securities, Wipro continues to be impacted by the lack of scale up in large accounts, apart from the continuing challenges in the energy and telecom segments.
Another area earmarked by Neemuchwala is localisation. In continental Europe, the IT major has acquired Cellent, which strengthens its presence, and is looking to setting up a delivery centre in Mountain View, California and two other cities in the US. Additionally, it is investing in markets like Latin America, Canada and Africa.
Neemuchwala believes that taking a non-linear approach, which involves not adding people to get more revenue, is the way of the future, in addition to automation. In the last quarter, Wipro had said that it had freed around 4,300 employees.
“This year we plan to do a large scale roll out across many clients and plan to release 4,500 people from our engagements through automation in the year,” he said.
Finally, Neemuchwala has laid out a plan to leverage the partner ecosystem such as start-ups, acquiring companies and other such things. This is in line with Wipro Ventures, which has a $100 million fund, headed by Rishad Premji, which has made six investments till date, spending $20 million.