Wipro expanding in Germany, to hire 1,000 techies

Indian IT bellwether Wipro Ltd is expanding its operations in Germany and plans to hire about 1,000 techies over the next three years, the global software major said Wednesday.

"As Germany is one of our focus geographies, which will play a vital role in driving our growth, we are investing substantially in the region," Wipro chief sales and operations officer for growth markets Rajat Mathur said in a statement from Cologne.

The investments will be made to build domain knowledge in growth verticals and hire local talent with delivery and programme management capabilities.

"We will strengthen our new business hunting approach to build a structured pipeline of business opportunities over the next three-five years," Mathur said.

Foraying into Germany a decade ago, the company provides end-to-end IT services to about 30 enterprises across the European country with 500 software professionals for onsite support.

Among its major clients are a global automotive firm, an European utilities major and a large telecom firm.

"We see a significant traction in retail, automotive, telecom, healthcare, banking, energy and utilities sectors in the coming years. We are also targetting mid-size enterprises in the region for incremental growth in future," Mathur noted.

The company has software development centres in Munich, Meerbusch and Nuremberg, with sales offices in Frankfurt, Cologne and Meerbusch.

"Our on-shore data centre at Meerbusch provides a range of IT infrastructure management services to our European and global clients," Mathur said.

The data centre can support up to 15,000 mainframes MIPS (million instructions per second) and 4,500 servers for its clients.

"In addition, we offer cloud centric and remote based infrastructure management services. We plan to expand the data centre into a full-fledged near-shore services centre for clients in Germany," Mathur said.

The company is partnering with the University of Munich to develop technical talent with internships to graduate students from the science/engineering stream at its facilities in India.

Industry estimates put Germany's IT market size in 2013 at about $80 billion. Large enterprises across the country are expected to increase their IT investments to address capacity constraints of information and communications technology and revamp legacy systems and IT infrastructure.

"There is strong outsourcing demand from mid-size firms. The demand is driven by cost-efficiency requirements and need for high-quality services for enterprise applications that have a direct business impact," Mathur added.