The Hindu Business Line : Wipro getting better pricing

Wipro Technologies will focus on creating “proactively” large deals this year. According to Mr Suresh Vaswani, President, IT Practices, Wipro Technologies, the company is seeing a healthy funnelling of deals.

“New contracts are coming in at 4-5 per cent higher pricing than what our current pricing is, and in contract renewals we are able to get between 3 per cent and 5 per cent. So we are able to drive pricing up,” he said during an earnings conference call with analysts.

The company has launched its ‘total outsourcing’ practice, which is built around infrastructure services. Deals bagged through this are fairly large size. “We certainly have a healthy pipeline of deals both in the infrastructure side, on the application and BPO side,” he added.

The company is working to increase the share of fixed price contracts as a percentage of total revenues. It is bidding for more developmental projects which can be more easily structured as fixed price products.

In 2007-08, fixed price deals formed 22 per cent of revenues. “We would expect it to go up towards 35 per cent (this year),” said Mr Girish S. Paranjpe, President, Finance Solutions, Wipro. It also plans to run application maintenance/restructure maintenance contracts as managed services contracts.

For the current fiscal, the company sees potential in India and West Asia as a lot many companies are planning investments in these regions, Mr Paranjpe said.

When asked if the IT budget spending in the US was still contracted and whether it would affect Wipro’s guidance this fiscal, Mr Paranjpe said, “Freeze on budgets is because of two reasons. One is because there is much turmoil in the financial markets. There has also been a lot of change in the management teams, especially in the financial services world. But, as new teams settle in and the kind of turmoil in the financial markets subsides, we are hoping that it will be back to business as usual in the second half (of this fiscal).”