Can take Appirio's services to customers: Bhanu Murthy

Interview with President and chief operating officer, Wipro

As Wipro struggles to see new business growth offsetting the slowdown in traditional services, the company is betting on its acquisition to fuel business. BHANU MURTHY, president and chief operating officer of Wipro, tells Ayan Pramanik and Raghu Krishnan that the acquisitions – HealthPlan Services and Appirio – could fuel more growth for the company’s services. Edited excerpts: 

The growth in emerging areas such as digital is not offsetting the fall in your traditional IT services. How serious is the gap?

The gap is in terms of a little bit of uncertainties in the current context. But, all customers know they have to get onto the digital services to lead the transformation. There are those who lead and there are some who take time. Everybody knows the efficiencies required on the run side is as important. While you bucket these things into run and change; both of them influence each other. A large portion of the insights we generate out of run are the ones that create opportunities for transformation. 

The people you deal in traditional services are different in emerging areas such as digital, where the conversation is at the top management level... 

It is not the same people. The budgets for the IT part are managed by the IT organisations. If you look at Wipro, we are not entering into a territory we have never seen. We need to look for insights that can fundamentally change the way our customers deliver their services. Either you give them access to new customers and new geographies they have never been accessing, or the manner in which they deliver services must change dramatically. Obviously, they look at a problem differently from the way an IT services person looks at the problems. In some instances, it is possible to say that technology should play a secondary role whereas what outcomes it generates is important. That is the pivot that we are making. 

How do you convince customers about the dramatic shift?

If you look at our acquisitions, there its relevance is a little less. You actually talk to the business owners. There is a platform we’ve built where IT takes a secondary role either because we manage directly or it is the second stage of what the business wants. We have started the journey. You have seen Abid (Wipro CEO Abid Ali Neemuchwala) talk about how our digital engagements are looking healthy. 

How much revenue do such outcome-based actions generate?

I don’t have a break up for that now. We have identified 23 themes, which we want to influence within Wipro because they help the customers do things differently across all verticals. Multiple new engagement models have come up. They are much more sophisticated. Some of the customers have moved to fairly sophisticated models. 

You spent $1 billion to acquire two companies this year. Will the acquisition help you grow faster and offset the decline in traditional business?

My view is that all these companies will also help us sell the rest of the business. For example, we will definitely look at the customers. Appirio is servicing now and we’ll be able to take rest of our services. Because it is focused on only cloud-based services. We can take Appirio’s services to other Wipro customers. We can provide a much deeper capability for these services. With these companies, we will not only become bigger in size but also bring in a lot of new capabilities.