Wipro has restructured its operating model from being industry-organised to market-organised and, as part of this transformation, the company has lined up $1 billion to be invested in the cloud services vertical over the next few years, Chairman Rishad Premji said at the Annual General Meeting on July 19.
Premji said the company will continue to invest in "building capabilities and acquiring market-leading talent” in growth areas. “We are accelerating our investments in TopCoder, our crowdsourcing platform and in emerging areas such as the metaverse, web 3.0, robotics, self-learning AI, and privacy systems,” he said.
The demand for digital, cloud, data and cybersecurity services is growing at a fast clip, and therefore, despite elements of uncertainty in the short term, long-term prospects for the technology services industry look impressive, Premji said.
“As enterprises adopt digital business models, they face significant challenges in navigating a complex ecosystem with multiple providers that are difficult to manage. They need an end-to-end transformation partner to orchestrate digital transformation for them. This is where we intend to play,” he said.
He added that the company is now more growth-obsessed than before, and is increasing its focus on larger deals.
Premji stressed that although the world is passing through a phase of severe uncertainty with the pandemic not over yet, inflation soaring by the day, an armed international conflict still continuing, and a climate and energy crisis turning worse, he remains optimistic. “I believe that great upheavals carry within them the seeds of great possibilities,” he said.
CEO Thierry Delaporte said the company is keeping a close watch on the economic headwinds and geopolitical challenges. “As companies become more sophisticated in the use of cloud technology, and as they start to understand its benefits, we expect the demand for services to remain strong,” he said.
He added that career progression and development are important for employees, which is why they have revamped their promotion cycle and incentive programmes. The company added of over 45,000 to its employee strength in FY22.
The war for talent in the IT industry continues and attrition levels remain high. In the fourth quarter, Wipro’s attrition was 23.8 percent. The company had earlier said it would promote people every quarter up to the mid-management level from July, and salary hikes will begin from September.
