‘We are sharpening client focus’

Azim Premji’s elder son Rishad Premji joined Wipro four and a half years ago, after a MBA from Harvard and stints with GE Capital in the US and consulting firm Bain & Co in London. He was initially in Wipro’s banking unit, then in the investor relations division, and now is the company’s chief strategy officer. In an interview to TOI, Rishad, who many believe will one day succeed his father at the helm of the $6-billion Wipro, spoke on IT industry trends and his role at the company.
How have the four and a half years with Wipro been for you?
It’s been great.Terrific. I was fortunate I could do different kinds of things in the company. Learnt tremendously. Worked with some very very bright, smart people. Could not ask for anything better.
What are the big changes that you see in the IT industry today?
The industry is demanding that we be domain focused with a stronger understanding of the customer’s business. Historically you could sell a siloed offering or a single service. Customers now want much more integrated offerings. Customers do not want this classic vendor or supplier model, they want to effectively be in bed with me and work with me much more closely. Customers are consolidating vendors and are selective about how many vendors to work with because they really want strategic partners. They are also looking for alternative commercial models that are risk based. You win if the customer wins and you lose if the customer loses. So we are looking not for mere technologists but for people who have also worked operationally in a particular domain like banking.
Wipro has been lagging its peers. Are you worried?
The way we look at competition is that they are a great benchmark.We are running the race for the long term. I think it is very difficult to run a race by constantly looking to your left or right or behind. So our objective is very clear, this is the agenda we want to drive and focus upon, while simultaneously benchmarking ourselves against competition.
One big advantage that Cognizant seems to have is that they have made great investments in the front end consulting and sales positions to drive growth. Are you looking at doing something similar?
We are investing more on the front end than we did in the past. The objective is to drive a growth agenda to invest in the sales organization, to invest into farming and hunting clients and to invest into the client engagement. We are more clearly segmenting our accounts to prioritize on which clients we want to focus our investments into and also which are the new accounts we want go after. We want to create a lot of differentiation in the front end and standardization at the back end. We differentiate through our domain expertise, integrated nature of offerings and commercial structures. We are also investing into new technologies for the next wave of growth. So we think we are doing all the right things in terms of driving the growth agenda and ultimately that has to pay dividend in terms of performance.
What are these newer technologies or capabilities that you are building?
Cloud will be big, customers want to move away from an installed base of IT to a more variable form of IT.We have a huge focus on mobility, as also on social media and analytics. There’s tonnes of information, but not enough intelligence about it. So we will help customers get the intelligence. As a CSO you have a defined job of looking for black swans and blue ocean spaces. Isn’t this leading to an overlap of roles of CSO and a CEO? That is not the way I look at it. My job is to work very closely with the CEO, helping define his strategy. So we work very specifically on different opportunities. I also work very closely with the chief technology officer, because he thinks about what can be the next technology waves and opportunities over the next 3-5 years in terms of the technologies that can be disruptive.
Is this vision also driven through you interactions with customers?
So I meet lots of different stakeholders both internal and external. I spend a lot of time with customers, industry analysts, financial analysts, business heads and consultants. This is to get an understanding of where the economy is going and get an overall pulse for where things are and how they are shaping.
As part of your VC-like activities, what exactly are you doing?
Currently we are funding about 13-15 opportunities that can pay off in the next 4-6 quarters. These would be incubated within that industry segment or vertical. But we would fund it, monitor it, evaluate it, and kill it if it doesn’t make sense. We don’t expect these to generate revenues today but they should make money further down the road. For example we are funding this initiative on the smart grid side, and also system integration capabilities around certain software-as-a-service (SAAS) models.