Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I have heard a lot of different perspectives on that one. There is a serious interest in having work done closer [to home]. Of course, maybe there is a bit of difference between pure BPO work and more development-oriented work; the time zone issue is more significant and so forth. But I guess there is one point that’s coming up quite a lot in my interviews. What is going on with the call center industry in India? What is your sense in that? Specifically, a couple of things, there seems to be a fatigue of working through the night. Is that a serious issue that you are seeing in your workforce? >>>

Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much of your business is catering to the India market, Manish?

Manish Dugar: At this point, it is miniscule. It’s less than 5% of the BPO business that is [from] customers; however, we intend to get to a model where in we get similar profitability and buy outsourcing work,  we also get similar profit per person by doing work for India. Otherwise, it goes against the grain of our entire philosophy of nonlinear growth.

SM: You are saying you want to reduce some of your dependency on foreign business and create Indian business, but you don’t want to change the profitability structure of that business to do business in India; you still want to maintain similar profitability structure?

MD: You are right on the latter part, which is that I want to come up with a delivery model and a cost structure that can deliver to me same average percentage and average per person, even by delivering to India customers. However, it is not to say that I want to reduce my dependency on foreign business and grow India business alone. >>>

Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the delivery model? I’m very interested in understanding more about Wipro’s rural BPO strategy.

Manish Dugar: Sure. If we are to address the ever increasing appetite of the clients in terms of hospital, and if we are to ensure that we are tapping the talent at the right place, being only in these tier one, tier two cities will be a challenge. At the same time, we continue to get enough supply of resources, and there are enough graduates passing out, enough number of schools and colleges. But with the size becoming larger and larger and with the need to be closer to where these employee bases are available, what is becoming imperative is to look at models which are delivering from near where the source is. Hence, the need to also look at tier two, tier three, but the next step or the real paradigm shift is when we go to a rural a center. >>>

Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I think your point about business process outsourcing to business functional sourcing is well taken, but you have mentioned different components of that. I would like to understand some of the trends that you see from your perspective. You talked about labor arbitrage, which was obviously the genesis of the industry. Wipro has been at this for many, many years, several decades already. What are the trends that you are observing in the labor arbitrage area right now? How much of your workforce, for instance, is in India, and what are the dynamics of the Indian labor arbitrage business? >>>

Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 1)

From its humble beginnings as a consumer products business in 1945, Wipro has become a global company that serves customers in IT, BPO and R&D. Although its headquarters remain in Bangalore, India, Wipro has expanded its service horizons to include, North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.  >>>

Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, it is your IP, the innovation that you are doing is your IP?

Ravi Pandit: Significantly our IP. In some other cases it could be a joint IP. What that means is that we are able to take it to any customer that we want, but the other person, the automotive OEM will be able to use it in an unlimited manner in his own production. >>>

Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And also entrepreneurs who play into that system; very interesting. So, are you seeing interesting developments in the area of location based services? We are seeing lots of location based services as they plug into the mobile phone and the GPS, the confluence of GPS and mobile phone and all sorts of infotainments. >>>

Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who is your first customer through which you learned the business?

Ravi Pandit: On the power train side, we started working with companies that are our partners, and then we bought a company in Bangalore called CJ Smith. CJ Smith has been a focused player on embedded software largely outside of the power train area. Between these two, we have been able to grow our business quite well. >>>