It’s been 11 months since Bhanumurthy BM was appointed as President and COO of Wipro, and was tasked with driving (software) delivery innovation, unifying its service offerings, and enhancing the company’s market visibility.

While the journey has started, Wipro still lags behind peers TCS, Infosys and HCL Tech. In a conversation with BusinessLine , Bhanu (as he is called), talks about the changes (in delivery) happening within the company and Wipro’s US plans. Excerpts:

Will you increase the pace of hiring in the US, and is there adequate availability of manpower?

One should be careful about the skill availability part. We also like to hire from campuses and train them to be relevant for the marketplace. As a part of our foundation work we are working with universities there to ensure there are more people who get attracted to the STEM programme.

Within Wipro how are you changing your training considering the above changes you spoke about?

These changes are happening amongst all levels of employees. For delivery leaders, there is a programme that has trained 700 such employees in the three quarters so far. Then, we have upskilled 30,000 employees (of the total 179,129 employees) on Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, Analytics, DevOps and Security.

They can learn this at their own pace across 35 different environments, though it is not mandatory. Employees seem to have taken a liking as shown in our survey, which has shown a 12.5 per cent improvement.

So, this Cognitive platform you talk about, how many projects is it getting into?

Holmes is being considered for almost every project. One proof point is that it has been deployed amongst 120 customers across 1,700 cumulative instances. This has happened in the first three quarters of this fiscal year.

It seems like it will take more time for these things to start yielding results. What do you say?

It is not a straightforward answer. If you look at the performance of energy and utilities vertical, our efforts are starting to bear fruits.

The stability of oil prices is releasing some pent up demand – which we had mentioned more than 6 months back – when we had clearly said we did not want to lose a share of the client’s wallet even at that time of uncertainty.

We have taken similar efforts in other verticals. The decision-making speed in the industry depends on how they view the macroeconomic environment. Higher volatility results in slower decision making and we cannot control that.

While software delivery has always been critical, what is changing now considering that Infosys, HCL Tech and you have all pointed out its importance in this quarter?

In the services business, you are remembered for your last failure. Where it is becoming interesting, is in the sense that we have to figure how much technology needs to be applied for delivery. The way we have looked at the method of work is that a piece of work can be done by our cognitive platform (Holmes).

Second – if we involve humans in a project, then how can we share them across different projects rather than a single one, which used to be the norm in the past?

However, there may be some projects where you may need dedicated project teams. At the same time, there is also a need for multi dimensional or full stack programmers, who are not confined to any particular technology.

There is also this bit about owning a technology platform, which can be offered on a subscription basis to our customers.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW