Wipro sees healthy pipeline from US clients

Signalling a turnaround in global technology spend, Indian IT bellwether Wipro is again seeing a healthy pipeline with customers in the US poised to make discretionary investments, a top official said Friday.

"We see a healthy pipeline and find customers in the US more amenable to making discretionary investments, especially in the previously challenged sectors," Wipro chief executive T.K. Kurien told reporters here.

Discretionary investments in IT services and products by global customers generate more business for Indian major vendors like Wipro as against non-discretionary spending, which accounts for repeat business and routine operations.

Though clients are in the process of finalising their 2014 technology budgets, the global software major expects them (budgets) to remain stable or increase marginally.

"Within the technology spend, we see increases in the 'change the business' budgets and pressure on the 'run the business' budgets," Kurien said after the company declared its financial results for third quarter (Oct-Dec) of this fiscal (2013-14).

From a geography perspective, the company saw very strong growth in the quarter under review (Q3) from developed markets with the US growing 3.2 percent and Europe up 5.4 percent.

Americas accounted for about 50 percent of revenue ($1.7 billion) from IT services business and Europe about 30 percent, while Asia-Pacific region and emerging markets contributed 12 percent.

"We have seen momentum in GIS (geographic information systems) which grew 5.6 percent sequentially. We expect GIS to grow faster than company average given the quality of the pipeline and order book," Kurien recalled.

The company is making investments in consulting expertise, platforms and IP (intellectual property) to better leverage its capability in customer experience, analytics and mobility.

"On the backend, we see customer demand for process simplification, standardisation and automation. Our proprietary product (ServiceNXT suite) addresses application management, infrastructure management, cloud and security operations, Kurien added.