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Wipro, India’s third-largest information technology (IT) services company, is rolling out a structure for its domestic and West Asia business, Wipro Infotech, to bring greater focus and accountability.
The structure, to be almost a ‘mirror image’ of the one for Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business, would bring greater focus to the market, which accounts for nine per cent of its overall revenues.
For the first time, the company has created a vertical structure for Wipro Infotech, the six business units it has globally for Wipro Technologies and, additionally, the government business unit. Earlier, Wipro Infotech had only four service lines, including managed services, system integration, applications and consulting.
“The major changes we are doing now are that we are organising ourselves vertically, while the strength of the service lines will continue. All the seven business units will run as separate P&L (profit and loss) owners headed by separate leaders,” Soumitro Ghosh, senior vice-president and head of Wipro Infotech, told Business Standard.
The seven business units are banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), energy & utilities, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and the government.
“We are giving greater autonomy to each of the verticals, which would now be responsible for sales as well as delivery, which would give far greater accountability to customers,” he added.
The new structure comes six months after the Bangalore-based company decided to hand over the charge of Wipro Infotech to Soumitro Ghosh, a company veteran who was earlier heading the BFSI business of the company globally. He was brought to head Wipro Infotech after Anand Sankaran, senior VP, and head of Wipro’s India, West Asia and global infrastructure services business, quit the company. Wipro is one of the dominant players in the Indian domestic IT outsourcing market, with huge exposure to BFSI, telecom and energy & utility. These three verticals account for about 60 per cent of Wipro’s business in India, followed by the government segment. However, a major part of Wipro’s offering in the Indian market has been infrastructure services, often touted as a low margin business. With the new structure, the company is planning to bring greater focus on application development and maintenance. “While we are not obviously slowing on the infrastructure services for which we are predominantly known in India, the new structure will bring a huge focus on the application side as well,” said Ghosh.
In addition to the new structure, Wipro Infotech has taken a similar approach to identify the top accounts in India, classifying them as ‘mega’ and ‘gama’. This would help the company to spend on such accounts which have higher potential for growth, accordingly. “Our aim is to increase wallet share among the existing customers as well hunt for new logos.”
Wipro Infotech has also identified a Rs hunting team’ to look after newer clients, as Wipro Technologies have been doing globally.
For the West Asia business, Wipro Infotech would continue to have geographic heads for the two key markets – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the Gulf countries. However, the sales team below them would be verticalised, which means while they would report to their respective geo heads, they would also have dotted line reporting to the vertical heads, under the new structure.
“In the Gulf as well as KSA, the growth potential is very high, especially in the KSA. Besides, both the markets need a higher degree of localisation. So there, we will have a geo heads for respective countries, but the sales team below them will be verticalised,” added Ghosh.
