Wipro Info plans foray into Cloud Computing

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wipro Infotech is planning to foray into cloud computing services. It's also making strategic investments into building vertical expertise and new areas. The investments will focus on India and the Middle Eastern markets. Wipro Infotech president Suresh Vaswani said, we plan to have a vertical focused orientation in the domestic and ME markets. This means building deep vertical transformational capability as opposed to just transactional capability.

For instance, the company will go for domain specific services in consulting and newer areas in infrastructure management like retail infrastructure and telecom infrastructure (towers/switches). It also plans to develop vertical templates next year for segments like government, defence and infrastructure & SEZs. These are specific to India practices for Wipro since we don't offer services in areas like SEZs. If successful, we might replicate them outside India also, Vaswani said.

The domestic and APAC arm of India's third largest software exporter is also venturing into cloud computing. We plan to take two approaches to the market firstly, tap the top 300-400 customers in a market and, secondly, offer cloud computing services to the mid-market customers, he said.

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is a computing paradigm shift in which computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a `cloud of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for. This method of distributed computing is done by pooling computer resources and managing them via software.

Says Vaswani, Though early days yet, many mid-market customers will start questioning why should they invest on their own infrastructure when they can avail of services like this. Cloud computing is a future business driver for us.

Wipro Infotech plans to soon structure its business into `on premise computing and cloud computing.

The company is also looking to replicate its India business model in the Middle East. `So far, we have been doing SAP implementation and software integration in that region. We will now duplicate our partnerships, and other services like network integration, IT infrastructure, software consulting and technology integration, he said.

The approach has already begun paying dividends as Wipro Infotech won its second biggest deal worth $100 million from Saudi Arablian Airlines. Till now, the average deal size from the region was between $4-5 million.