'IT firms' smaller deals have not gone slow'

Q&A: Manish Dugar, CFO, Wipro Technologies

IT companies have seen their day sales outstandings falling steadily quarter upon quarter by improving their collections and simultaneously focussing on smaller deals where paybacks are faster. Wipro Technologies CFO Manish Dugar tells Ravi Menon that smaller deals are coming in use to gain mindshare and pave the way for the big-ticket contracts.

How are you handling smaller deal sizes at present?
While we are wanting to get more and more of the large deals the engine managing the smaller deals has not gone slow and one of the USPs of the Indian players has been the ability and willingness to do smaller deals which we continue to leverage on.

Is the move towards greater bundling of services — technology, operations and analytics — continuing to yield results?
Being able to provide end-to-end services and provide a one-stop shop to the client certainly helps in getting the mindshare of the client and become strategic partners for the client. It enhances the ability to deliver higher value-adds within our services portfolio. We have been seeing the benefits of this in the form of pipeline and winning of larger deals.

There has been much talk of greater customer expectations and the need for outsourcing companies to become partners in business risk. How are you addressing this?
We are able to leverage on our knowledge of having done the work before as well as understanding customer needs to come up with innovative business models.

This is a win-win situation for both the client and us. It also enables us to keep the (business) risk at levels acceptable to both.

How do you expect longer sales cycles impacting your bottomline going forward?
As long as the funnel, conversion and quantum of revenues flowing in on a quarter-on-quarter basis is as per plan longer sales cycles only mean that we need to plan for the longer term more often than before. It does not necessarily mean that the costs of selling go up, thereby raising concerns on the bottomline. It is important to note that we do not necessarily see the sales cycle becoming longer going ahead.

Any real examples which you could cite here?
We have experienced longer sales cycles with a large energy company in the APAC region and some deals in India.