R&D services on rise: Wipro

BANGALORE: Wipro officials today said that R&D outsourcing was on the rise. These high-end services now account for around 36 percent of Wipro's overall revenues.

Explaining the growth drivers for the trend, AL Rao, COO, Wipro said, “ Typically around five-15 per cent of a company's sales is invested into R&D. So far, the percentage of R&D outsourcing is less (around eight-ten percent) as compared to IT outsourcing (where around 30-32 percent of work is outsourced.”

He expects the R&D services outsourcing to increase by another eight to ten percent in the coming years. Rao also said that technology trends like data convergence were pushing companies to outsource part of their work to third party providers.

Some of Wipro's product engineering work is in areas like next generation mobile technologies, security software and development of CRM software. The division employs 12,000 engineers and is showing sequential double-digit growth.