Outsourcing: Interview with Roop Singh, VP and Head for North America, Europe and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services (Part 1)

Roop Sing is the vice president and head for North America, Europe, and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services. Roop brings more than 24 years of financial experience to the company. Prior to Wipro he was CEO of SSI Technology. He graduated from Henley, obtaining an MBA in international business. In this interview Roop talks about outsourcing strategies focused in different areas of the world, including the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and Asia, specially focusing on insourcing vs. outsourcing strategies.

Sramana Mitra: Roop, let’s set some context about what part of Wipro you work in and your background, so the audience knows whom they are meeting today.

Roop Singh: I am Roop Singh and I run Wipro’s Consulting Services. The Wipro Consulting Organization operates primarily out of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and India.

SM: Give us an overview of what you have seen happen in your business in the last few years and what the top trends on your radar are right now.

RS: From 2007 to 2008, when we saw the economic crisis that is still continuing, we saw major shifts in the way people procure technology and how technology is used to enable business. Wipro is a large IT services organization, predominantly providing offshore servicing. We have seen a major trend in terms of the change that is happening in outsourcing. This is driven by what happened in 2008/2009, and is continuing at this point.

If you take the genesis in terms of how we started outsourcing in the early 1990s and the direction we have taken, early 1990s organizations’ outsourcing strategies were primarily related to low-cost options – resourcing that could be provided by companies based on low-cost locations. As a result, they could get that benefit directly impacted to them. As that trend continued, organizations in 2003/2004 started saying, “Perhaps we could do more knowledge processing and more domain-centric work through outsourcing companies.” Service providers had matured to be able to provide that sort of capability by building domain specialism and industry capability.

That continued. Several evolutions of that happened – r-sourcing, one-sourcing, two-sourcing, etc. What is interesting is that in 2008, when we were really hit by the economic crisis, companies that were looking at sourcing strategies had to take a step back and look at what the impact of those strategies was for them. Did they really throw the baby out with the bathwater? They were thinking about just using outsourcing for non-core services and were retaining the core services. That trend changed over time, as outsourcing organizations became more familiar with the work organizations wanted to do. They found that a lot of the core processes were also outsourced, so they became heavily reliant on them.

As the economic crisis continued, they had other socioeconomic pressures. Why are organizations outsourcing to countries that really don’t influence the way in-country works? Why aren’t they looking at insourcing strategies? Why aren’t they looking at underdeveloped regions within the country, and if they belong to a community such as the European Community, why aren’t they going to the Eastern European market to retain the option in that region itself?

The person who was driving the sourcing strategy within the organization, up to a certain extent, had to understand the procuring of outsourcing strategies, but also needed to become a lobbyist. He needed to get local, central, and regional permission to start doing this – especially in the financial services sector, they bumped into a lot of liquidity to support some of these organizations. Now they had a vested interest that sourcing strategies deployed by these organizations also benefited the regional and local communities. The role of these individuals has changed up to a certain extent. Rather than outsourcing to China, India, or other countries, they are now asking if it is possible to focus on an undeveloped region in the North of England, for example? Especially where unemployment has taken over.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Outsourcing: Interview with Roop Singh, VP and Head for North America, Europe and JAPAC at Wipro Consulting Services
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