Wipro begins monetising from its intra-preneurship projects

India's third largest IT firm Wipro has begun offering solutions to customers from entrepreneurial projects of its employees in segments such as corporate treasury and software defined infrastructure.

So far, Wipro has incubated 75 ideas and funded 13 projects of its employees, which it calls it intrapreneurial, offering them mentoring and infrastructure to build solutions that can be taken to customers.

The disruptive ideas of the employees are equally encouraged as part of its Horizon programme. This means funding ideas of the employees who are involved in the existing projects of Wipro and understands the business problems better. Industry analysts say there have been credible efforts by companies like Citibank and others through hack-a-thons and outputs of such events are more likely compared to acquiring start-ups externally.

"I will not be surprised if monetization has already happened in Wipro for such an initiative. It makes sense for the internal employees, who are on the ground and working with clients, to be groomed and given funds. They will be in a better place to give back to the company as they are more closely placed to add value to the company's outstanding problems," said Sanchit Vir Gogia, of Greyhound Research.

Wipro's internal projects include managed file transfer as a service platform, open source solutions, corporate treasury solution, software defined infra among others.

For example, Wipro's MFTaaS (Managed File Transfer as a Service) is a platform that helps enterprises seamlessly integrate and collaborate in a cost-effective manner with their clients, partners and employees. The platform has handled over 2.5 million file integrations across a portfolio of global clients and is now available on Microsoft Azure marketplace. Different themes have varying incubation periods," Wipro said in a statement.

Since Abidali Z Neemuchwala joined Wipro as the company's chief operating officer from larger rival Tata Consultancy Services, the Bengaluru-based IT services have been focusing acquisitions to increase its capabilities in new areas of technology services and spent more than $ 1.13 billion in acquiring global firms. These acquisitions have also helped Wipro get talent in newer technologies. For example, with the Designit acquisition, the company took on board around 300 engineers who have skills in cloud, digital and other emerging technologies.

"We are enabling Wiproites to come up with ideas that we find again on the same lines of Wipro Ventures and incubate disruptive ideas to drive entrepreneurship within our employees. We have invested in 75 such ideas and 4 in the last quarter (Q2 FY17)," Neemuchwala said recently.

In fact, such ideas have already been implemented with the services offered Wipro's clients and the company witnessed revenue conversion. The revenues, however, are not disclosed. Works based on these ideas have 'started delivering revenues as part of the change agenda that Wipro is driving for its clients', Neemuchwala added.

Outside of this initiative, Wipro has its Venture arm that evaluates and invests in startups that work on emerging areas such as artificial intelligence, security and automation.

"Overall, we have now made eight investments and already committed a spend of around $22 million from our Wipro Ventures capital fund and on an average, we continue to look at about 5 to 8 startups a week," Neemuchwala said.