Outsource Magazine

This article originally appeared in Outsource Magazine Issue #25 Autumn 2011

Rajan Kohli is Wipro Technologies’ CMO, responsible for developing – and protecting – one of the most prominent brands in international outsourcing. Outsource got together with Rajan over the summer to look at his organisation’s strategic priorities for the next few quarters…

Outsource: Rajan, it’s a very interesting time for the provider community globally with a number of potentially game-changing opportunities in the offing. Where is Wipro’s strategy being directed at the moment?

Rajan Kohli: Our drive is to move away from being an “outsourcing” company towards looking at performance enhancement for enterprises. We have identified three main areas of significant investment: cloud, mobility and analytics. Outsourcing will continue to be the bread and butter, but we want to take these three areas to the market and position ourselves more as a partner that delivers business performance to enterprises, rather than just doing outsourcing.

O: The analytics area in particular is interesting in terms of moving up the value chain – are you selling an analytics spread to companies that might not have an in-house analytics capability as well as taking it out from those that do?

RK: We are looking at analytics is in a number of ways. One is purely analytics: clients that do not have analytics, or have invested in building data houses but need that top layer to really drive real-time high-quality performance analytics. This leads me to the opportunity that we see in this space today. We are integrating our analytics capabilities with our BPO offerings, thereby creating "business performance" solutions. There’s a whole lot of BPO that we already do for our customers; how can we combine that with the analytics piece and add value back to our customer?  Because a lot of our customers are saying, “OK, great customer service, but what analytics or insight can you drive from this customer service?” Definitely there is an overlap between our BPO capability and analytics; similarly there is an overlap between our cloud capability and our analytics because we will eventually deliver those analytics over the cloud to our customers. We see a lot of innovation happening at the cusp of emergent technologies and it is at these intersections that we are building our next generation "business performance solutions" on.

O: Which leads nicely into the cloud generally…

RK: We’re working with our customers on cloud, where we are either enabling them to go on public clouds, building private clouds for them, re-factoring their applications for private clouds – or we have some offerings of our own where we have a cloud-based platform. The cloud market is of course is still nascent – but we see ourselves as an enabler of a massive cloud movement, whether it be public, private or a hybrid model.

Generally speaking our play is the adaptation of technology, and building business and technology competence around technology that customers can use – we’re not going to produce the next technology, we are certainly for example not going to invent the internet, but we’re going to find ways in which customers can use internet to their advantage.

Having said that, in terms of the technologies of tomorrow we do have a very big play in R&D: we are the largest third-party R&D provider globally in terms of spend – a lot of people don’t know that…thus areas like machine-to-machine communication are a natural foil and will be a big area for us; another is an intuitive customer interface. More and more customer interaction is becoming intuitive in nature, so how different products have that built into their design, and how they’re designed, is increasingly important. And we also have a growing investment in nanotechnology: last month we announced a partnership with IMEC to build a nanotechnology R&D centre in Bangalore.

O: And you say a third focus area is mobility: what’s driving your efforts here and how is this an attractive area for someone looking at outsourcing?

RK: The mobility pitch is very solution-specific. It’s not “I am the mobility expert; come to me”; it’s more, “OK, for you as a bank I can help you build mobile analytics apps” or “for you as a healthcare player I can build remote diagnostic apps”. And then the business proposition wrapped around that is important – the value proposition is around the business case for how mobility will help you make money and how your business process will improve. The conversation with the CIO two years back was all about sharing services, taking this cost out, taking that cost out: now, the conversation is “OK, so if you’re saying mobility, help me build a business case: what’re you gonna do? Analytics? Help me build a business case.” Also the conversations today are increasingly business-led with a lot of the LOB (line-of-business) owners showing interest around these technologies.

O: Now, you mention healthcare there, and within the UK particularly that obviously plays into the public sector arena: is that a market that particularly interests you?

RK: The public sector in the UK is definitely a market we’re interested in. Among our various geographies where we are addressing government business, the UK is definitely ahead in terms of the traction we have, in terms of the RFPs we are receiving. This is also led by the extreme need of the government to reduce cost, while improving customer service...

Outsourcing has been something that the whole public sector has been talking about for a quite a while now and if you see the budgets that come out and the spends that they’re putting on technology, they are enormous: whether they’re actually utilising it in the right space, whether they’re seeing benefits from that, has always been the question. We are in on those conversations, we are having the right conversations and we feel that the playing field is becoming more and more level, where everyone has an opportunity.

O: And what about other geographies? Are you putting a lot of effort into emerging markets?

RK: Absolutely: they’re so much our focus that actually we have got a separate organisational structure just looking at those areas: South Africa, Latin America, and in fact we have added Germany and France also in that group, because although they are developed, from a global sourcing play they’re still under-penetrated. However this is not at the cost of the US and the UK, because while competition is intense there, the market has shifted from being a more demand-led environment to a more pull-led environment, and if you have the right solution you are able to create the right value proposition – and then your chances of success increase.  So the US, the UK, the traditional outsourcing markets definitely continue to be of major interest and our growth rates in those markets stand up.