Wipro wants to get 10 per cent of the revenues from its PES (product Engineering Services) by focusing on user experience.
“Around two years ago, we started focusing on end user experience with a couple of our divisions. Right now, around 5 per cent of our revenues come from our focus on user experience. By December 2011, we expect it to go to 10 per cent,” Mr Sanjay Gupta, Senior Vice-President, Product Engineering Solutions, Wipro Technologies, told Business Line .
Wipro wants to ensure that all 16 divisions of its Product Engineering Services (PES) group become more user-focused by December 2012.
This is in line with the three strategies for Wipro's future highlighted by Mr T.K. Kurien, CEO for Wipro's IT Businesses, while announcing the results for the quarter ended June 30, 2011, namely consumerisation of IT, variabilisation of IT and analytics for a constrained world.
Explaining the shift in the nature of work that Wipro does, Mr Prasad V. Bhatt, Vice-President - PES, said, “We have to understand what the customer needs. For this, we need to have a continuous dialogue with the customer”.
Towards this end, the company has been hiring people who will focus on user experience. For example, Mr Gupta said, they have a chef who works on one of the microwave ovens that Wipro is designing for one of its clients to oversee the browning of the crust.
“We are delivering usage of the microwave and not just the box.”
In a related example, Mr Gupta said that Wipro is also working on a TV for another client for the US, where one of the usage parameters is to see how quickly data from Netflix, an American provider of on-demand internet streaming video, gets downloaded.
Wipro got around 13.8 per cent of its revenues in financial year 2010-11 from PES.
PES, which had around two divisions in 2000, added 10 new divisions by 2008. Since then, four more – mobility, automobiles, energy and product lifecycle management – have been added.
“The worldwide R&D budget is over $1 trillion and we see a big potential here,” said Mr Gupta.