BANGALORE: Indian software services capabilities are widely known and well respected across the globe. But until 2000, it was the individual Indian IT worker that the world sought after, while the industry was looked upon merely for sub contract works. This because, the big guns bagged the order and outsourced it to their Indian partners.

The global economy crash led to the corporate world being forced to outsource work to India citing cost benefits - triggering the BPO wave. However the Indian IT giants were making steady progress to compete with the big guns globally for the "huge orders." Some of the major wins include, Wipro and TCS sharing the Lehmann Brothers order win among others. Speculations are also abuzz that Infosys is tipped to bag the coveted order from Telstra. The Australian telecom major had been traditionally outsourcing its work to the big blue.

In a speech delivered during the the FICCI- McKinsey Workshop on Competing Globally and achieving global leadership, Chairman of Wipro, Azim Premji, stated, "The first step to global leadership is to understand the customer and the quantum increase in expectations. Customers all over the world want the highest quality, quickest delivery cycles and lowest costs. That is an absolute reality. Understanding this reality forced us to gear up at an altogether different level of excellence."

Started in 1945 as a cooking fat manufacturing company, Wipro diversified into IT in 1980 and a decade later launched its global IT services business in 1990. To compete with global players, "Wipro was the first Indian company to embark on Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a powerful tool to minimize defects and cycle times, improve customer satisfaction and generate enormous cost savings. Six Sigma also helped us to create a culture of teaming. In our IT business, we become the first Software Services Company globally to be certified at Level 5 of SEI CMM and the first company globally to be rated at Level 5 of PCMM. We pursued Quality relentlessly and pervasively, because achieving international standards of excellence is the first step towards becoming a global company," he added.

Competing globally means to position itself as global company. Premji comments, "No company can command global leadership unless it can seamlessly integrate companies and leadership from different national backgrounds. To begin with, Wipro has always believed in developing many of its leaders from within. We first defined Wipro Leader’s Qualities in 1992 and fine-tuned them as we grew. When we decided to go global, we added on "Global Thinking and Acting" as a leadership quality. Also, we realized that it is equally important for Wipro to have a culture of assimilation. Any organization that becomes too closely knit is more likely to reject outsiders like a body rejecting transplanted organs. Global excellence needs sensitivity to the various cultures. Cross-cultural skills are extremely important for people to effectively interact with other and forming diverse teams." Technology is all about being innovative and in software services it plays a major role. "At Wipro, we have defined Innovation as implementation of a new idea that results into a marketable product or service. We have put in place a structure to make Innovation happen more by design than default. We are working around priority themes. The ideas are taken through an Innovation process, which has several evaluation gates to encourage only the best and the most deserving ideas to get through," said Premji.

In conclusion Premji attributed these imperatives for competing globally and global leadership to a strong foundation of Values. "The events in the last few years have only strengthened our belief in the importance of Values for business success. What is lot more difficult than achieving global leadership is sustaining it. This is only possible if there is absolute transparency of action across the organization. With global compliance standards becoming even more stringent, this will be a fundamental requirement of any global leader."