Wipro brings consulting business under digital unit umbrella

India’s third-largest software exporter Wipro has brought its consulting business under the umbrella of the digital unit as part of a move to drive faster growth from newer areas of technology.
The restructure comes weeks after Wipro undertook its biggest organisational overhaul in the last five years.
Wipro created the digital unit last year and set a target of generating $1 billion in revenue from this vertical within 3-4 years. The unit is expected to reach that goal quicker than previously anticipated, given healthy growth driven by higher spending from top clients such as Deutsche Bank.
“We’ve made a change where we have now moved Wipro’s consul have now moved Wipro’s consulting business into our overall digital business — we will still operate the consulting business as consulting, but it will now report into me as part of overall digital business,” Rajan Kohli, global head of Wipro Digital, told ET on Thursday. “For all practical purposes you should see it as a move to get to the $1-billion mark faster -we are ahead of where we thought we will be at the beginning of this year,” he said.
Kohli said Wipro Digital has been reorganised, keeping in mind that a greater share of revenues will come from consulting in the near future. Given that consulting and digital both overlap in a lot of areas, he said it made sense to combine both capabilities.
“We do a lot of consulting work within the business unit domain team as well as some of the other service lines — there is consulting that is done in bits across all our service lines and the business units. So we’ve also taken the governance to be able to manage consulting across the board for Wipro because today with the complex transformation we’re attempting, we need all these pieces to work together,” said Kohli.
As part of the latest reorganisation, Wipro has also assigned a select band of senior executives across all business units to focus on digital revenues solely.
“In each business unit, we will have a very senior person reporting into the BU heads who will own the digital revenue from that unit -that’s the level of commitment and focus that digital is receiving,” said Kohli.
Experts tracking Wipro said that while the company had shown progress in newer businesses such as digital, it still has a long way to go to catch up with larger peers such as Cognizant.
“Wipro digital business has shown some signs of life. However, compared to the market opportunity and the moves others are making in this space -in particular Accenture and Cognizant — they are in no way a market leader,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder and CEO of outsourcing advisory Everest Group.
Ray Wang, founder of technology research firm Constellation Research, said Wipro has a good digital team. “What’s key will be adding a balance of digital artisans. If there are a lot of scientists, technologists, engineering and math talent, you want to balance the teams with anthropologists, designers, ethnographers, visual artists, and user experience experts,” Wang said.