Wipro Opens Facility in Mexico

Indian outsourcer Wipro follows Infosys, opens a facility in Mexico to better serve clients in North America and Latin America.

Indian outsourcer Wipro Ltd. has opened a software development facility in Monterrey, Mexico, to offer services to clients in North America and Latin America in the same time zone and geographical proximity.

Wipro made the announcement Tuesday when Mexico's President Felipe Caldersn Hinojosa visited its Bangalore campus. He is in India to promote business collaboration, particularly in IT, between the two countries.

Mexico's broad language skills and proximity to Canada and the U.S. helped Wipro decide to establish a presence there. Latin America is also a strong emerging market where many of Wipro's clients operate.

Wipro's Monterrey facility will employ 100 people. Some of the center's Mexican staff are already training in Bangalore.

Infosys Technologies Ltd., another Indian outsourcer, announced last month that it is setting up an IT services and BPO (business process outsourcing facility) in Monterrey. Indian outsourcers like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., of Mumbai, have also invested in services delivery centers in Latin America with an eye to offering near-shore services to clients in North America and to service the Latin American market.

Wipro announced last month that it is setting up a software development center in Atlanta and plans to hire staff for the center from local universities. The center, which will have 500 employees by the third year of operation, will help Wipro in hiring highly skilled workers and domain experts who will be critical to Wipro's business growth plans in the U.S., the company said.

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Infosys, Wipro said to be eyeing analytics firm

Indian offshore giant Infosys and Wipro are reportedly both gunning for MarketRX, a US-based provider of analytics services for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, according to a report in the Economic Times, an Indian paper.

Analytics has attracted a lot of attention from outsourcers recently as a higher value service to tack on to their existing offerings. Much of the work in this area is around marketing analytics - tools and services to help companies better understand and devise customer strategies.

Some Indian vendors have built up their own analytics business, and others have acquired analytics vendors in recent years. WNS, for example, earlier this year bought Marketics in a deal worth up to $65m. And last year fellow BPO provider EXLService bought Inductis, another analytics provider.

But with Infosys and Wipro now eyeing this space, it's no longer just the BPO specialists looking to get serious about analytics. The market for analytics is young but clearly poised for growth. And companies seem willing to pay dearly for access to this market. The Economic Times said MarketRX could fetch a price between $150m and $160m, some five times its annual revenue.

Infosys, Wipro chase same co for first time

BANGALORE: India’s tech posterboys and cross-town rivals Infosys Technologies and Wipro have shown interest in buying out the US-based high-end analytics company MarketRx. The indicative valuation of MarketRx is seen between $150 million and $160 million (Rs 615-650 crore), sources said.

This is probably the first time the Bangalore-headquartered Infosys and Wipro are seen chasing the same company for a possible acquisition. MatrixRx’s $160-million valuation is five times its revenue, the sources added. It is believed that the promoter expectation is “slightly north of this valuation”.

It is learnt that four-five suitors have expressed interest in MarketRx after the company mandated William Blair & Company in the US and Avendus in India to explore options, which could lead to a possible sellout. “The promoters are exploring various options regarding the future and will take an appropriate decision. The process is on,” said a source familiar with the developments.

For software services biggies like Wipro and Infosys, the acquisition will give a headstart in the analytics segment of the knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) segment, as it takes considerable time to build one’s practice organically in this business. According to industry sources, it will take a minimum two years for any BPO to have a credible presence in the analytics space.

with people coming from diverse backgrounds such as mathematics, statistics and chartered accountancy.
Industry observers said analytics services bring in higher revenue per employee compared to conventional IT services. The rates of analytics services range between $30 and $60 per hour while some high-skilled statistical modeling processes attract up to $150 per hour.

Wipro has been focusing on inorganic growth, with its now famous string of pearls strategy. Infosys, on the other hand, is getting aggressive on the M&A front. A target like MarketRx provides the BPO arms of both Wipro and Infosys a platform to get into transformational business deals. Unconfirmed reports suggested that BPO major WNS could be also in the fray, but ET independently learns that the Gurgaon-based company is unlikely to join the race. Early this year, WNS acquired another analytics firm Marketics for $65 million, valuing it almost 10 times its annual revenue. The names of the other likely contenders could not be ascertained, but sources said so far private equity firms have not shown any interest. An email query to MarketRx did not elicit response, while Infosys and Wipro declined to comment on speculative reports. MarketRx was started in 2000. It has over 350 employees spread across the US, Europe and India. Its list of investors include the US-based venture fund Sequoia Capital. The India operations were started with the Gurgoan centre in 2003 and supports the US teams on collaborative projects besides servicing European and Asia-Pacific clients. MarketRx has more than 75 small and big pharma, biotechnology and medical devices companies as its clients. Third-party analytics is growing steadily in India with more players entering the space, but currently it being dominated by captive units of MNCs, especially the financial powerhouses. The likes of HSBC, Standard Chartered, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity, Bank of America have their captive centres in India which do high-end analytics work.

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Infosys, Wipro lose their rank as the best IT employers

BANGALORE: Breaking the concept that Infosys and Wipro are the best employers in India is the Seventh Annual Dataquest-IDC report. The survey pushed industry bellwether, Infosys to eighth position from last year fourth position. India's third largest software company, Wipro does not figure among the top 20 IT employers.

According to the details of the survey 2,844 software, hardware and marketing professionals from 33 it companies employing 304,834 people in the top seven cities threw up the top 20 best IT employers based on a combination of employee satisfaction and HR scores.

The top five ranks went to TCS, HCL Info, iGate, RMSI and Synechron. The next five positions went to IBM, Capgemini, Infosys, Tavant technologies and Sun Microsystems. India's largest company, TCS, retained its numero UNO status in the best top 20 survey for the second year running.

The challenges of scaling up were countered through innovative HR practices. With almost 15 percent of its 90,000 employees based in foreign shores, TCS has replicated not just its programmes but also its ethos across multiple geographies, to achieve consistency in the workforce.

Commenting on the high points of the survey Pradeep Gupta, publisher of Cybermedia said , ''Multinational IT employers IBM Capgemini, Sun Microsystems and CSC have mastered the art of managing Indian employees to rank among the top 20 best IT employers in the country. Others, especially many India-based IT employers, will need to balance aggressive recruitment with the warmth and personal touch they used so effectively thus far, to retain people as they ramp up headcount."

Among the existing employees of Infosys, only 28.2 percent voted for it as "my dream company" in the 2007 Dataquest-IDC survey, compared to 36.6 percent last year. The employees of Infosys ranked their company very low on several parameters like growth opportunities, compensation and relevance of perks and benefits. Ironically, among the rest of the 2,844 employees of this industry-wide survey, those not working in Infosys it topped the votes as their dream company to work for.

The report also pointed out that the average attrition rate was down marginally to 14 percent from 15 percent last year. The top five reasons why it professionals changed their jobs were compensation, job posting abroad, growth opportunities, job location and technology area of work.

When asked what gave them satisfaction on the job, the employees voted career development opportunities, work life balance, organisational culture, job security and technology as the five top areas. Even though compensation was the top reason for job change, it ranked at number seven when asked what satisfied them the most.

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India Staff Shortage No Big Deal - Premiji

Wipro’s chairman downplayed the impact of staff shortages in India, saying they won’t hold back the continued growth of the country’s outsourcing industry.

Indian outsourcers are managing despite the shortages by hiring plain science graduates and retraining them for engineering work, Wipro Chairman Azim Premji told reporters on Wednesday.

A significant portion of work currently done by engineers is actually suited to science graduates, he said. Some analysts and industry executives have observed that India’s outsourcing industry often deploys staff on jobs for which they are overqualified.

Wipro and competitors like Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services are also expanding in China and Eastern Europe to supplement their Indian staff. Wipro, which has operations in Shanghai and Beijing, will also set up operations at a third location in China, Premji said.

Indian outsourcers compete for staff in India with multinational services companies like Electronic Data Systems, Accenture and IBM that have set up service delivery operations in the country to take advantage of low staff costs.

A report released in December by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) forecast a shortage of 500,000 staff for India’s outsourcing industry by 2010. That shortage can be largely overcome by improving the quality of education and having finishing schools for students, since currently only about a quarter of engineering graduates can be directly employed by the IT industry, Kiran Karnik, Nasscom’s president, said recently.

Wipro has the capacity to train about 5,500 staff at any given time, while Infosys can train about 4,500. Infosys is increasing the training capacity at its center in Mysore to 13,500 over the next year, an Infosys spokeswoman said.

Wipro’s attrition rate in the quarter that ended Sept. 30 was 15.9 percent, but the company is not worried about it, according to Premji. After a salary increase last month, the attrition rate has started to come down, he said. TCS reported an attrition rate of 10.6 percent, while Infosys reported an attrition rate of 12.9 percent for the quarter.

Wipro downplays any impact that the attrition rates may have on its business. Like other outsourcing companies, Wipro has processes and documentation in place to ensure that work does not get disrupted if staff quit, said Sudip Banerjee, president for enterprise solutions in the company’s Wipro Technologies Division.

Most of the attrition occurs at the "entry level," among staff who have up to three years of experience, Banerjee said. Although salaries in India, where Wipro has most of its staff, have been going up by about 11 percent annually, it has not had a big impact on Wipro’s profits, as the salaries of its staff in India account for only about 18 percent of its total costs, he added.

He made his remarks on the same day that Wipro reported its financial results for the three-month period ending Sept. 30. The company reported strong growth in revenue and profits, reflecting the overall buoyancy in offshore outsourcing to India.

Operating margins for the company’s outsourcing business were stagnant from a year ago, however, at about 24.4 percent, because of the increase in salaries last month for about two-thirds of its staff, said Suresh Senapaty, Wipro’s chief financial officer. A salary increase for the rest of the staff is due in November, he added.

India’s largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services of Mumbai, and second-place Infosys Technologies of Bangalore both reported strong revenue and profit growth for the quarter, citing business from new customers and a general upswing in outsourcing to the country.

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Joke - Elephant and Infosys, Wipro & TCS Folks

Another email forward.

One day, three consultants, one from Wipro, one from Infosys and one from TCS, went together for a walk. They were old buddies from b-school, and they were joining together to remember the tough old days they went as students together.

For no apparent reasons, they went into this zoo an passed an elephant.Having worked in the same field and from the same school, of course there is a little bit of peer competition going on between themselves, so when he saw this elephant, an idea clicked the Infosys guy, he said to the others ' Why don't we prove who are the best among ourselves?'. The other two, of course, agreed.

Then the Infoscion said 'Let's make a test. Whoever can make this elephant to laugh, he works for the best firm'.

After they all agreed, they started. Being a pure logical strategist, the Infoscion tried to make the elephant laugh by telling jokes. Of course it stayed still... As a more practical consultant, the Wipro guy tried to make funny gestures... and the elephant still stayed still.... Now, comes the TCS guy.. Being the practical guy he was always told to be, he whispered something to the elephant, and it laughed at him while pointing its fingers to him...

The other two were astonished. How come this TCS guy be able to beat them? So the Wipro guy said 'OK, let's make another test. Let's make this elephant cry !!'. So there they went again, practicing the same method as before. The Infosys guy told sad sad stories, the Wipro guy made sad gestures, and they fail again......

Then, the TCS guy whispered something again to the elephant's ear and it just cried, weeping.....and patting the TCS guy's shoulder.
This cannot be, thought the other two. So the Infoscion said 'OK, you've won twice. If you can win this test, we will bow to you. Let's make this elephant run'.

He went and bark to the elephant orders to run. Of course, it stayed still .... The Wipro guy pushes the elephant and stab it with stake to make it run, it stayed still. So...our TCS guy come to it and whispered something again to it's ear and the elephant run and run as fast as it could, as if it was scared to death.

The other two surrendered. They say 'OK, you're the best pal. You work for a very good firm, tell us your secret'.

'Well' said the TCS guy, 'the first time I made it laugh, I said I work for TCS'.

' When I made it cry as if it were very sad and patted me, I told the elephant how much I get paid'.

' And when I made it run scared to death, I said to it, Why don't you join TCS?'

Azim Premji Turned Western Indian Vegetable Products into Wipro

This story is about Azim Premji and Wipro, and its journey from Western Indian Vegetable Products into Wipro. This story about this humble man is worth reading.

When Azim Premji took over his family's company in 1966, it wasn't the outsourcing powerhouse it is today. Then, it was known as Western Indian Vegetable Products, a poorly managed producer of cooking oil.

Wipro is still cooking, but in a different and much more profitable way. As India's leading outsourcer, the company has locations around the globe and offers everything from research and development to customer-care call centers. Clients include Microsoft, Nokia and Sony. It is a $2.4 billion company bringing its total staff to 56,435.

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