CM: As American companies increasingly move their software development tasks offshore, new concerns are being raised about the security risks involved. Are you finding that your clients are requesting better security?
Paul: We see that question come up a lot. What we try to do is walk our customers through our own policies and procedures about how we secure their data, how we secure their intellectual property, whether its network security, physical security, or employee security. … Every element in that chain is as good if not substantially better than what the alternatives are. Because the realities of having 13,000 employees are not unlike managing five city blocks in Manhattan. This needs to be managed on the basis of process rather than on individual performance, and that's what we try to do. I think that answer generally satisfies our customers.
CM: We know that you've acquired certain assets from American Management Systems. This has allowed you to move deeper into specific industries. Do you expect more of that?
Paul: Acquisitions are difficult to forecast because you never want to get yourself in a corner where you have to make an acquisition. One thing I've learned about acquisitions is that they never solve your problems. You inherit somebody else's headaches but now are able to do something with that that gives you a better solution. … We want to make sure that as we go through the courtship we communicate the elements of our culture and we understand the elements of their culture. We become comfortable with each other through that process and, as a result, while we have taken a look at 100 companies, we've only done small deals. We want to make sure that we get it right. We want to make sure we don't run before we can walk. I think that our confidence is growing: We've made a couple of successful acquisitions, we've done the integrations well — we think we know how to do this. So we are absolutely open to making acquisitions.
CM: And we should look forward to, perhaps, more ambitious acquisitions in size and scale?
Paul: Absolutely. Size is key; with each step that we take, our ability to get more confidence in digesting a bigger piece only grows.
CM: The people who came with the AMS and NerveWire acquisitions … there were people, industry-specific consultants there … were they U.S.-based?
Paul: U.S. and Europe.
CM: Should we expect to see similar consultants who have relationships deep within certain verticals and client relationships?
Paul: We are committed to an industry-focused organization, and as a result, for us the ideal acquisitions are where we can get deeper and deeper in the industries we target.
CM: Culturally, how are you creating this organization? Are there any misunderstandings for these outside consultants who join your organization?
Paul: So far not, and perhaps disappointingly so. We tend to overwhelm when we buy a company or a business unit that has 90 consultants and then we have 15,000 engineers. You can figure out which ball moves which ball when that happens. As a result we tend to overwhelm in the acquisitions we have made but we are sure that as this team comes in — we only closed on January 1 — and they gain self-confidence and they gain the ability to understand what's going on around them so that they can be very serious change agents for us. That is our expectation.
CM: Are you looking for representation in all industries or are you picking three to get focused on?
Paul: We do have multiple verticals. We clearly have financial services, and in that we focus on securities, insurance, and banking. Then, on the non-financial services side we have manufacturing, retail, utilities and energy — which we combined together — and media and entertainment. These are the main verticals that we are going after.
CM: We are aware that firms such as Accenture have lobbied for legislation expected to help privatize large portions of the U.S. government. Is Wipro likely to take this approach?
Paul: In all practicality, government business is the much tougher part of the business for us, so while we are not going to say no to government business, we also recognize that our success is going to come from companies that are already used to the notion of companies being global, and not from business that requires us to first educate a mid-level bureaucrat in Alabama, for example.
CM: We've been told that Wipro's client work is expanding upward. What does this mean, exactly?
Paul: The way I look at it is that you can define consulting on a very broad spectrum. At the very basic level, we have a workforce that gets the spec of what a customer wants to be built or they say, "Here is what I want you to manage," and we go and do it. Now, what we are seeing is clients asking for a much broader line of consulting services — and in response to that we are encouraging our people to grow their understanding of technology as an architect endeavor. To do this, they need to understand about the business background and actually develop points of view. So when a customer says "Do this," we can actually push back and say, "Well, first have you considered this or that?" To build this broader approach, we are looking to add consulting capability.
Now, we are not looking to position ourselves in the space of a Bain, BCG, or McKinsey — we are staying very much focused on business process as it relates to follow-up technology work. So, if you will, it is a thick layer of consulting. The redefinition is more along the behavioral characteristic changes that I mentioned, and it's in line with what our customers want. Three years ago, customers were saying, "Here is a piece of code, write it." Then they said, "I want you for complex large projects." Now what we here is, "You have been working with our systems for so long, and frankly, you know more about them than we do. Don't just wait for me to give you direction — you help me figure out what I should do." Now the CEOs are asking, "What can you do for the business?" So, it's more in keeping with what customers are expecting from us rather than it being an internally driven change initiative.
CM: When it comes to using offshore consultants, part of what we've been hearing is that it is not as easy to outsource applications development as many companies often believe …
Paul: Anytime you talk about change in delivery, it requires time. I think that the big trap that's awaiting CIOs is venturing into this area where you have a price range of "x" dollars per hour to "y" dollars per hour, and you go, "Why can't I just pick the lowest?" The reality is that there is a whole bunch of companies that started out being more staff augmenters and not just offshore staff augmenters. When you make a selection like that, you end up with problems, because what you need is a system that allows you to have global project development — which frankly not a lot of people have — and an ability to be able to have talented people both here and in India. There will be a few failures, but a lot will depend on the vendor selection. This sounds self-serving, but it's okay to be self-serving, because we kind of figured this would be the biggest problem people would face and therefore have invested a lot in having quality systems that are global, where there are collaborative tools that people can work with and also have a workforce that frankly works at hours that most people don't. Part of the global delivery process is that I start my day at 7 a.m. and I end at 11 p.m. … We push for projects that are a quarter on site and three-quarters offshore so that we can keep a team here that can provide that liaison. That's just a simple example of the kinds of things you need to do to make this global delivery model work.
CM: Will you be developing talent in other parts of the world as well — for example, programming talent in China or Eastern Europe?
Paul: We have looked at that, and frankly at this moment in time we are not in a terrible hurry to go in that direction. And the reason is, sometimes there is a cost in being too early just as there is a cost in being too late. And we fear we might be a little too early at this moment in time. The reason is that if I look to be able to hire people in Eastern Europe and the Philippines, China, etc., and be able to get the same process quality out of them, my confidence level is not very high.
CM: Have you continued to evolve and enrich your value system as you bring other cultures into the organization?
Paul: Absolutely. In some sense we also have a very unusual problem. Forty percent of our employee base has less than two years' tenure at our company, and that is a result of growth. If we have more than doubled in the last two years, then honestly, naturally we have almost half the people with less than two years' experience. So now you are talking about a company growing so fast, adding so many people, how do you scale your culture? How do you scale your values setup? We've spent up a lot of time articulating and rearticulating our value statement, but not doing it terribly frequently, maybe once in three years. … On a broader level, because you have to scale a culture and values, we knew there would be one thing all employees would touch whether they are based in Canada, New York City, Bangalore, Boston, or Barcelona, and that is our intranet. We converted our intranet from being more of a "how to" to being a community-building device. How do we encourage more collaboration, how do we encourage more interest groups being formed, how do we create more tools for people that allow people to track each other? And our intranet today gives them the feeling of being part of a global whole.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.