Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I think your point about business process outsourcing to business functional sourcing is well taken, but you have mentioned different components of that. I would like to understand some of the trends that you see from your perspective. You talked about labor arbitrage, which was obviously the genesis of the industry. Wipro has been at this for many, many years, several decades already. What are the trends that you are observing in the labor arbitrage area right now? How much of your workforce, for instance, is in India, and what are the dynamics of the Indian labor arbitrage business?

Manish Dugar: I guess labor arbitrage is an important factor. It continues to be an important factor and will continue to be an important factor for the foreseeable future. However, what has happened is just being an India provider is probably going to keep you out of a lot of business which requires, as we call it, a glocal presence, a globally local presence. For example, as we start serving global customers that have operations starting from the Far East to the Middle East to continental Europe to Latin America and North America, we are looking at a partner that can do all of the services end to end rather than having somebody doing the India service, somebody doing English-language support, somebody doing continental European language support, and somebody else doing Far East language support. Clearly, the need to be able to deliver from all countries and from all languages is essential today. Being a pure-play Indian vendor is probably going to shut you out of that market.

SM: Would you give me an example of a customer for whom you would do global business function outsourcing?

MD: Well, one of the largest breweries in the world, we provide them services. From the U.S. we have centers which provide them services. From Brazil, we have services being provided for them, from continental Europe and Romania. And similarly, for a large, the retail company we have services being provided from Romania, Poland, the U,K and from India. There are several examples. I can give you a large manufacturing company for services at various places in continental Europe and India.

SM: So you are winning those accounts [because] you are able to take the entire function and do all the different languages and different time zones and everything across the world?

MD: Exactly. We have the ability to provide all types of services. Our ability to provide all types of language support and to deliver from all regions is key to winning some of these deals which otherwise you don’t even get called for the report.

SM: So, the countries that you rattled out are Brazil, Romania, India, and what else?

MD: If you are able to talk about the locations where we  have delivery centers, we have in Australia, we have in Japan, we have in China, we have in the Philippines, we have in Romania, we have in Poland, we have in Mexico, we have in Brazil and we have it in the U.S. And, obviously, we have it in India as well.

SM:. I would like to understand a bit more about the dynamics of the delivery centers in each of those countries. Let’s start with India. Wipro was a Bangalore company. What is going on with how Wipro is developing its BPO strategy in India? I assume you are no longer a Bangalore-centered company?

MD: As I said, in India we have nine delivery centers. We are in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Bombay, Pune, and Calcutta. These are what you would call tier one and near tier one cities, or maybe somewhere around tier two sometimes, but they are now becoming tier one cities.  We also are evaluating. This was in the news some time ago. We have started a pilot. Our first batch of employees are already in training in what we are trying to create as a rural BPO. This is not even a tier two or tier three city. This is actually about an hour and a half, two hours’ drive from  Chennai. The model that is being developed is something which will be small, small centers distributed at various locations which can provide significant talent. At the same time, it is a different delivery model altogether, which can be a new paradigm if we are able to successfully deliver.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO
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