Thursday, October 27, 2005
Bangalore's Tech King
BW Online October 13, 2003 India's Tech King
Azim Premji is the chairman of software-services provider Wipro. He is arguably the most influential business leader in Bangalore. Businessweek has a profile of him and his company. Wipro is a corporate leader in the Bangalore tech explosion. The success of Wipro and its chairman has outgrown Bangalore itself. These are global companies playing in a world market. Bangalore was Wipro's home base but the global market forces expansion and mobility on every corporation:
The threat of competition from India has many people in the digital services industry concerned. As Americans come to understand the consequences of outsourcing and offshoring there are increasing calls for political action to limit the competition. According to Businessweek:
However Indian corporations have their own worries about competition from American and Western Corporations which are moving to bangalore and the other high tech centers of India and the developing world. Will Wipro be able to compete? Or will Indian high tech companies be swallowed up or driven out of business by more powerful transmittance corporations? According too Businessweek Azim Premji is only too aware of the global competition:
Azim Premji is the chairman of software-services provider Wipro. He is arguably the most influential business leader in Bangalore. Businessweek has a profile of him and his company. Wipro is a corporate leader in the Bangalore tech explosion. The success of Wipro and its chairman has outgrown Bangalore itself. These are global companies playing in a world market. Bangalore was Wipro's home base but the global market forces expansion and mobility on every corporation:
"At 4:30 a.m., a light switches on in Azim H. Premji's spacious stone bungalow in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The 57-year-old chairman of software-services provider Wipro Ltd. (WIT ) is awake, fueling up on coffee and bombarding company managers on four continents with e-mails about everything from geopolitics to contract details. At 7, Premji walks the 250 meters to his office on Wipro's five-hectare campus. There, he has breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast with visiting customers or government officials. That's followed by meetings where he focuses on the minutiae of the business -- the cost of airline tickets or whether frequent-traveling Wipro salespeople should have permanent cubicles. Before the sun is overhead at noon, Premji has already worked seven hours, with another seven to go. Frequently, Premji ends his day on a commercial flight -- there is no corporate jet -- to Bombay, San Francisco, London -- anywhere his sales team needs a boost.
The threat of competition from India has many people in the digital services industry concerned. As Americans come to understand the consequences of outsourcing and offshoring there are increasing calls for political action to limit the competition. According to Businessweek:
For the growing number of white-collar workers from Silicon Valley to Sydney worried about losing their jobs to low-wage software experts in India, the ambitious billionaire is a serious threat. Yet this IT mogul faces the challenge of being too successful. With the U.S. caught in a jobless recovery, the issue of outsourcing to low-cost destinations is becoming ever-more controversial. American politicians are calling for restrictions designed to make it harder for companies like Wipro to win business. On Oct. 1, the number of U.S. visas available to foreign professionals fell by 66%, to 65,000. The move will hit Indian companies such as Wipro especially hard, since they often dispatch engineers from Bangalore to their U.S. customers' offices.
However Indian corporations have their own worries about competition from American and Western Corporations which are moving to bangalore and the other high tech centers of India and the developing world. Will Wipro be able to compete? Or will Indian high tech companies be swallowed up or driven out of business by more powerful transmittance corporations? According too Businessweek Azim Premji is only too aware of the global competition:
Mostly, though, Premji seems to see himself as a citizen of Wipro. Competing with rivals that have long-standing, clubby, boardroom-level relationships with top U.S. and European companies is a tough game. Premji knows what he has to do: move quickly into the lucrative consulting area and try very, very hard to win business. "I've learned to overrespect the competition," he says. "You have to build some paranoia into your system."
The competition, meanwhile, seems to have learned to respect Wipro -- and is taking a page from its success. Global tech-services firms have awakened to the new, low-cost, high-quality IT services India offers. Accenture, IBM, and Electronic Data Systems are moving into India aggressively. Together, the three companies have hired 4,000 new staff over the past year and are renting prime office space on Premji's own turf in Bangalore and elsewhere. That will allow them to offer the benefits of India's lower costs to customers, just as Wipro does.
Analysts say Indian companies' lower overhead, smaller size, and greater agility will give them a fighting chance. If they don't succeed, though, Indian enterprises such as Wipro could end up being just coding-contract factories for the West. As long as that threat remains, Premji is likely to remain sleepless in Bangalore -- or wherever he happens to be doing his laundry that night.
