Vivek Paul claims solution to burgeoning headcount

When Vivek Paul left Wipro in 2005, the company’s IT business employed about 51,000 people, including some 14,000 for its BPO business. About six years since, the company employs over 131,700 people for its IT services business. It’s not just the case with Wipro, but almost all other IT services companies too have seen their headcount go up quite significantly during the last few years.

Paul, who founded the India-focussed PE firm Akansa Capital and KineticGlue, a cloud-based enterprise software company, says as the Indian IT services firms are reaching a stage when the huge number of human resources they employ will make them less manageable, it could hamper growth.

“Indian services companies are growing bigger in the employee strength. They need to organise themselves for the growth they are experiencing,” said Paul who was in Bangalore to attend an industry event.

Paul was the CEO of Wipro’s IT business from 1999 to 2005 after Ashok Soota left the company to start MindTree. He is considered the brain behind Wipro’s growth into a billion dollar company and listing it on the New York Stock Exchange.

He also said that the size of IT services companies was bringing in bureauc-racy which in turn is preventing companies from giving better customer satisf-action and quality of service delivery.

The solution, he feels, lies in the adoption of enter-prise social media what most Indian companies with the exception of Cognizant, are lacking.

Keeping this in mind, Paul in July 2010 had set up KineticGlue, a cloud-based enterprise software company offering social applications for businesses. The company recently acquired a Bangalore-based web solution company called Injoos with an aim of providing social media for enterprises.

Paul, however, says that the adoption of enterprise social media in India is lesser than the West and it is evolving. “We have started to focus on large Indian corporate houses and that has gone well,” Paul said.

On the product ecosys-tem in the country, he said the ecosystem is not good for the companies, but it is improving.

The problem is that start-ups and entrepreneurs need to interact with each other and share ideas on a personal level. “You should have absolutely no hesitation in going from business to business without any baggage. There is no age limit for an entrepreneur,” he added.