Wipro Infotech streamlines market strategy

Wipro Infotech, which has a very small share of the Indian personal computing market, is seeking to change this by setting a rapid pace for growth.

The personal computing division which takes care of desktops, notebooks and servers, grew by over 50 per cent in the first quarter of this year and intends to grow above the industry average in the entire year.

To enable this, Wipro Infotech, the domestic and Asia Pacific arm of the IT business of Wipro and the part of the company manufacturing hardware, has streamlined its "go-to-market" strategy. It has recategorised the Indian market into metros, non-metros and out-locations.

Significantly, much of the current growth has come from out-locations which indicates the way in which small and medium businesses in these places are adopting IT.

Wipro Infotech caters only to businesses and not the home market. Wipro has put Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai under the metro category: Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad and Coimbatore in the non-metro category and 20 other towns and cities under out-locations.

According to Anil K Jain, general manager-personal computing division, Wipro Infotech, "Besides changing the manner in which we looked at the Indian market, we also opted to provide a two-level hierarchy to our customer to facilitate better access. With this, we could not only penetrate rural areas better, but also improvise on the delivery of our own internal processes."

Jain feels that there is a huge scope in out-station locations that generally do not get personal attention to enable them to fulfil their computing requirements.

To be able to provide personal attention in non-urban areas without having to be physically there, the company has set up a call centre. To facilitate outreach and propagate the Wipro brand, the company's services and maintenance division is maintaining both Wipro's own products as well as those of other brands.

According to the IDC volume shares for the Indian market in the first quarter of this fiscal, Wipro Personal Computing division had a share of 3.1 per cent in desktops, 1.1 per cent in notebooks and 3.8 per cent in servers.

In order to reach to small and medium businesses, especially in rural areas, Wipro depends heavily on its channel partners, besides a direct sales force of over 100 people in 23 different locations, up 60 per cent in the last year.

According to Jain, the Indian computer market will reach 4 million by 2005, of which 68 per cent is expected to come only on the enterprise side.

"Being one of the few Indian manufacturers, there is a huge market potential in this segment. Hardware requires a lot of handholding of customers and we are gearing up to meet their requirements."

The IDC numbers also project a 25 per cent, 10.5 per cent and 47 per cent growth for desktops, servers and laptops, respectively, during the current financial year.