We have put in the basic ingredients to execute well: Wipro COO

Bhanumurthy says Wipro is keen on expanding its health service platform in US to other countries

With Wipro, the country's third-largest software exporter, lagging peers Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and HCL in the quarter ended December 2016, B M Bhanumurthy, president and chief operating officer at information technology major Wipro, talks to Alnoor Peermohamed and Raghu Krishnan about the regulatory challenges the company faces in the US and the process of integration of its new acquisitions with Wipro. 

Edited excerpts:

Are there similar health care regulatory regimes in any other countries?

It’s not about the regulation part. It’s a platform on which people can choose and members can be serviced. Similar needs exist in different geographies. Similarly, you can look at that platform not only for the insurance search — you can look at it for life and other insurance capabilities.

Are there already plans of taking this out of the US?

We have demonstrated the feasibility to customers in other geographies.

Could this offset the slowdown in the US?

I don’t want to comment on whether it will or not but that platform was strategically built with this intent — one, expand to other geographies and, two, to add additional capabilities to that platform. Both are still on. The core leg is the one that services the open exchange markets in the US and that’s the leg in uncertainty.

We’ve spoken earlier about the Appirio acquisition helping to transform Wipro. Where are you on that journey?

It’s a fairly recent acquisition but there are a couple of things we’re doing. One is obviously the joint proposition of Wipro’s own and Appirio’s capabilities that are resonating well with customers. We are able to complete the conversations on both the propositions described here — customer facing activities, the sales management piece of it and the second one is on the employee engagement part.

The third thing we’re looking at is how our clients would get used to cloud-based environments. With Appirio, we can show how easily you can get adapted to one. There are a couple of threads running now, apart from the core capability of Appirio, which is implementation of Salesforce and WorkDay and all that.

The TopCoder platform you acquired with thousands of freelancers -- how is that growing?

That is the method in which work could get done in our industry. There have already been some experiments of work we’ve done internally and we’re upgrading the speed with which we are doing those experiments internally. The platform, the TopCoder which we acquired through Appirio and TopGear, which we had internally -- we are integrating those two, so that we can take one for both internal use and for customers. The big thing is that TopGear has very strong capabilities on learning, which we want to add to TopCoder. That’s the integration going on right now.

You’ll soon take it to customers?

We’ve already started.

What’s the feedback?

Good feedback. Some of our customers are already thinking in that model; they understand what it is. For others, we have to explain how to make your current workforce more effective by the use of this platform.

You are as confident as others of growing faster. Why is this not being reflected in the numbers?

If you look at our business, the first part is our employee engagement. If you look at those numbers, we’ve seen a huge growth in our employee perception. The survey has come out very recently, so it’s hot.

Second, if you look at our investments in training people, we told you about the training we’re providing for our delivery managers, for our sales teams and for our programming community. We are covering close to 10,000 people in this and it’s a big investment.

The third thing is the propositions that we have -- how do the analysts feel about those. The past four to six quarters, what they call the dot, where they position it in the quarter ends and so on, the dot movement has been significant on a variety of services that we offer.

The fourth thing is the customers we are already servicing, which is critical. If you look at our customer satisfaction scores, they have gone up significantly. The way I would look at it is the right investment in people and they are engaged. Analysts perceive that our offerings are very relevant to the marketplace. Our current customers seem to get very satisfied and our satisfaction scores are increasing. I’m not saying there’s nothing to improve but we’ve improved them.

And, the final one is our investments in digital and other projects. So, all the basic ingredients for us to execute well —basically, that’s what we’re putting in.

Will this translate into better numbers in the coming quarters?

That I will not answer because we do not give expectations for the full year and things like that.