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'Wipro wants startup DNA in the new business' [India Business] [Times of India](Times of India Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) BANGALORE: Wipro has created an independent business unit called Change the Business Services that will offer opportunities for employees to work like entrepreneurs and experiment with ideas in emerging areas like machine learning and platform-based services. The basic concept looks similar to Infosys' products & platform services division, which is about to be spun off into a separate subsidiary. In an interview to TOI, Wipro CEO T K Kurien talks about the idea behind it. Excerpts: Wipro has made one acquisition every year for the last three years. But it has signed 10 partnerships with specialized firms including picking stakes in US-based Axeda and Opera Solutions last year. Going forward, would you pick up more stake in automation and big data/analytics vendors? That's exactly where our focus is going to be, especially around customer experience and automation. We will invest in areas like machine intelligence. I'm dead scared about buying something 100% and bringing it inside the company as it will never evolve. I need to keep it at an arm's length and yet have control over it. That calls for strategic partnerships. The game of the future is strategic partnerships and not about ownership. You've launched a new unit called Change the Business Services that operates with a startup mindset. How is the DNA of the unit different from the outsourcing business? All of us who come from a traditional business in IT services come from a mindset where we attack and defend. As the company grows, defence becomes the DNA of the organization. When you are an upstart, you have nothing to defend and you end up attacking every day. That's the DNA we want in our new business. It requires a different mindset and you can't confuse the organization with two different mindsets, and hence, this will be an independent unit. We have to preserve the existing business, and yet create another flag where you will have a completely new business that's more experimental in nature that could fail in several attempts it makes. But that's the nature of the business. How would you structure this high-risk business? It will function with a startup mindset where reward mechanisms will be different. We will have an accelerator that focuses on machine learning. Anurag Srivastava's role is not to be the CEO of that business, but to look for opportunities to invest and create a new business. It will have its own CEO and leadership structure to offer everything as a service. We might give entrepreneurs sweat equity and if they are successful, they can keep equity and sell it back to us at a higher price during exit. It's a massive incubation shop where we will make more investments. Our belief is that it will require a couple of years of experimentation. But if we succeed, it will change the way the future of the company is going to be in the next 10-15 years. Would it be hived off into a separate subsidiary? No, it will be an independent unit. What we are trying to do in the new business is to find a niche and dominate it. In oil and gas, for instance, subsurface is one of the areas we have identified that would be part of the new business, and how I offer it to customers on a pay per use model will be important. Your full-year IT services revenue is up by 6.4%,which is half the industry growth rate of 13%. Do you think your restructuring exercise is still work in progress? What we did a few years ago was not restructuring, but a cultural change. We were trying to drive focus around customers, accountability. This quarter has been a little bit of an aberration and we have a problem in the retail business which we should fix. The India business hasn't grown. So there is work to be done to get secular and linear growth. In the June quarter of this year, if you assume, we are going to be at the bottom end of our guidance, we would still grow at 8%, and I know there is a 5% gap between 8% and 13%, but I am pretty much confident that we will get there. (c) 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Company Limited |