Wipro forms groups to target telcos

Wipro Technologies has set up a separate group within its Telecom and Product Engineering practice to aggressively tap the opportunities in the telecom service providers' space.

Combining the knowledge base of its product engineering business and the telecom service providers practices, the company has formed the telecom applications and solutions group. The group, with a headcount of 2,000 people, is working to build expertise in the network-related space to serve the telecom operators better.

"Earlier, our services to the telecom service providers were mainly confined to providing applications like billing, customer care, accounting and internal IT services. We were not doing much work on the network side. Now we are able to design and develop new solutions for the networks," said A L Rao, chief operating officer, Wipro Technologies.

The company is planning to utilise the expertise of TAS in specialising in areas like network level testing, operation support system and to develop applications that sit on the network.

Recently, Wipro Technologies won two clients each in the US and the UK in the telecom service-provider space. Rao said the contracts gave a major break to the company in the service providers' area and the company was planning to further ramp up the practice.

Wipro recently integrated the telecom service providers and the product engineering services divisions to create telecom product engineering division. TPE is now the single largest business of the company and contributes about 33 per cent to Wipro Technologies' revenue.

Over half the 18,000 employees within the TPE work for the telecom equipment vendors and operators. Rao said going forward the company expected a huge growth in the telecom operators space.

"Today the focus of most of the equipment vendors is moving to solutions. They are not just selling devices, but want to manage networks as a managed service for their customers and operators. We expect the growth in this space to be exponential in near future," he added.