Wipro Infotech eyes large defense deals

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wipro Infotech, a division of the US $6 billion Wipro Limited, serving India and the Middle East market, is aggressively looking at defense sector and is working towards bagging some large deals.

Vikas Srivastava, vice president, Infrastructure Technology Solutions, Wipro Infotech, said “We see that India is high growth region; especially sectors like BFSI and defense. Long decision cycles, inclusion of private players for partnership had been a matter of concern in past, but they have a lot of scope.”

He mentioned that, Ministry of Defense (MOD) is actively looking forward to make the sector more hi-tech, in order to achieve that, the department has floated number of tenders and is in process of inviting more. One of the projects that the company is eying at present, is Tactical Communications System (TCS), which would amount around a billion.

Last year, while addressing an Army-CII seminar on ‘Military Communications: Role of the Industry, Chief of Army Staff  had announced that the department needs to step up communication infrastructure, that includes building Tactical Communication System-2000 (TCS-2000), Mobile Satellite Service (MSS) and Combat Net Radio (CNR).

All this while, there had been an on-going debate in the DoM, whether these projects would be open to private partnership, but the optimism shown by Wipro indicates the outcome. This is indeed a huge opportunity for the Bangalore-based IT bellwether and  other bidder like HCL, L&T, Mahindra Satyam and many more.

Vikas added, “Over a period of time, there has been a great transition in government's modus operandi. They have shown inclination towards public-private-partnership (ppp) model, outright purchases, revenue sharing and defined Service Level Agreements.”