Information technology (IT) firm Wipro Ltd is keen to partner startups in India to drive innovation and digital transformation for its clients, chairman Rishad Premji said on Friday.
“What startups can do for India today is what IT service companies did for the last 20 years in terms of brand building, employment, and wealth creation. Companies like us are going to work with young companies. Today, we have a new-age team at Wipro that works only with young companies that are in the range of $5-10 million,” Premji said during a discussion with Sudhir Sethi, founder and chairman of Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India).
Working with smaller companies is a significant change in strategy for Wipro as its typical customer base consists of large enterprises in the range of $2-10 billion of revenue.
“Not only are we finding ways to work with them as customers but also to partner with them or leverage their capabilities to bring them into our sphere of innovations right,” Premji said.
Premji said many IT services companies, including Wipro, are also focusing on building productized solutions for their customers. “That does not mean we will become a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company or product company…We are looking at productized solutions that we can couple with our services and take to offer our customers.”
Wipro is keen to tap the different pockets of innovation in various parts of the broader ecosystem. “The challenge is not to access it but to bring it together seamlessly in an integrated manner, in a consumable form to the customer,” he added.
He said there can be much tighter coupling between services and the startup ecosystem. “I think it’s complementary in terms of how we can leverage each other.”
Wipro works with about 40 new-age companies in India in different capacities.
“We have an external innovation group based in India that works with young companies outside of Wipro ventures, because we can partner with a company without investing in them,” Premji said.
