The Hindu Business Line : Chennai is major focus for Wipro Tech

Good talent pool, infrastructure: Mr Sudip Banerjee (left), President, Enterprise Solutions, Wipro Technologies, and Mr Chandrasekar Dharuman, Vice-President and Location Head, at a press conference in Chennai on Monday. –

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Chennai, March 31 Wipro Technologies will invest about Rs 700 crore in an 80-acre facility in Sholinganallur-Elcot Special Economic Zone located in south Chennai.

It is also building another 90-acre facility inside the Mahindra City SEZ in the city outskirts. This facility is expected to start operations in 2008-09.

The Shollinganallur-Elcot facility is being set up to accommodate 35,000 seats and is already partly operational with around 2,500 people. Over the next 12 months, the Bangalore-based IT major plans to add around 7,000 people in the new facility, Mr Sudip Banerjee, President, Enterprise Solutions, Wipro Technologies, told newspersons.

“With great talent pool and good infrastructure, Chennai is a major focus for us,” he said.

In the last eight years the company had spent around Rs 2,400 crore in Chennai. Around 12,000 employees for Wipro are working in Chennai, making the city the second biggest operations for the company, after Bangalore.

Enterprise division

Mr Banerjee said the Chennai operations would continue to focus largely on the enterprise division, which consists of retail, healthcare and life science, energy and utility, manufacturing and TMTS (technology, media, transportation and services).

The enterprise division has been contributing 43 to 44 per cent of Wipro’s revenues, which was $917 million in the quarter ended December 2007. The percentage has been the same for the last three years and will continue to be so in the near future, he said.

Apart from having centres of excellence teams in broadband, retail, banking, wireless, consumer electronics and a Japanese competency lab, Wipro’s Chennai operations has a global command centre set-up to support multiple customers through a unified service desk, says a company press release.

Slowdown impact

On the likely slowdown in the IT industry, Mr Banerjee said any major change as a result of happenings across the world would happen in one or two quarters. The global effect on financial services will affect other sectors, including retail.

However, new industries like airline are opening up and will spend more on IT. The Indian market is also expanding for IT services. For Wipro, 18-20 per cent of revenues come from the domestic business. This will only grow faster, he said.

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