Global-O&O

SOURCE: EconomicTimes
DATE: May 5th, 2008

Mohit Soapbox:

This is an interesting move to create a global program to focus broadly outside of IT and look at non-IT wipro businesses under one umbrella. I wonder if there is a true synergistic approach across businesses or is to keep senior management from walking away.  Premji is also setting up a venture fund and has infact has already made a few investments in the retail sector (Kouton) and an oncology healthcare service provider (Healthcare Global). It seems like diversification and focussing on non IT business is what Wipro is aiming to do. Although the PE fund is not part of the wipro umbrella.  Given the tremendous growth in consumer care and retail markets in business , I wonder if Wipro missed on opportunities across these growth businesses as it became a leader in IT services. With the IT services industry reaching a mature phase of growth and the other parts of the business still having a higher growth potential is Wipro going to take their focus on other areas of business. Will Wipro in five years have similar revenues from non-IT that it gets from IT. I don’t know am just speculating.

ARTICLE 

Wipro is in a rejig mode. The company, which also has interests in consumer care products, lighting and infrastructure engineering, is forming a group that will work across the three businesses focusing on new initiatives in these areas.

Called the Global Program Team, it is headed T K Kurien, who was until recently at the helm of its BPO services. Kurien’s move to the new role coincides with that of Sudip Banerjee’s appointment to head Azim Premji’s billion-dollar personal corpus, and that of Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe as joint CEOs.

Mr Kurien is credited with making the BPO arm, which was largely a voice-play when it acquired Spectramind, into more of a value-added services player. After Raman Roy, the founder of Spectramind, moved out of Wipro BPO, Mr Kurien has been heading the BPO services that is growing at an annual rate of about 22%.

Wipro has made a few more changes in its business structure. The management team consisting of A L Rao, P R Chandrasekar, Sudip Nandy, Mr Vaswani, Mr Paranjpe, and Mr Banerjee has been dismantled and the business units will report to the joint CEOs. The new structure will have five industry-specific business units (BUs) and five technology units.

The industry-specific BUs are — manufacturing and health care, energy and utilities, retail and transportation services, communication, media and technology, and financial services. The technology units will be — BPO, testing, infrastructure management, enterprise application services and product engineering services.

A few business units have been re-grouped . For example, the technology business unit handled by Sudip Nandy will now also have communication and media. Manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities that used to come under enterprise business reporting to Sudip Banerjee has now been broken and re-grouped .

Some like the product engineering services have increased their scope from working for only technology firms to now working across all industries including those such as health care and manufacturing.