Wipro Infotech's new practice, consulting services, which has notched up nearly 40 customers in its first nine months, is planning to ramp up its operations and enter the US and European markets.
Anurag Srivastava, head for consulting services, told the new practice is expected to contribute at least 10 per cent of the total pre-tax profit of Wipro Infotech in a year.
"We plan to grow by 150 per cent during the next 12 months," he said.
"It is a high realisation business. We have already turned profitable," Srivastava said.
He said the new business has around 50 consultants some of whom are from the top three consulting firms in the world. "We plan to triple that number in a year," he said.
Srivastava said the importance of the consultancy service can be gauged from the fact that it helps a company save at least 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the total costs.
Srivastava said the ramp-up plan includes expansion of its activities to include the US and Europe too, though the practice already has bagged a client in the US.
Currently, it operates in Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East. He said once they enter Europe and the US, they will be in direct competition with global consultancy firms.
Wipro Infotech is the only business of Wipro Ltd, which has a separate consultancy service while Wipro Technologies has consultancy services attached to each vertical.
The new practice has four main domains which are IT strategy, business process redesign, programme management and change ennoblement.
In the IT strategy consulting, there are around 8 customers including one of the top three reinsurance firms in the world, a US stock exchange, a large retail chain in Australia.
Practice head for strategic consulting, Mahesh Nagarajan admitted that all the eight customers have turned to the company for their IT requirements.
"But that was not the intent. It is a completely independent entity. If our consultancy assignment leads to more business for Wipro, it is more because of the confidence our customer has than anything else," he said.
Nagarajan said IT strategy involves complete strategising for the company. The strategy defines the kind of application the client needs to have, it defines the operating system the application should be run on, the organisation structure itself and how should the IT be managed including how much should it be outsourced to a vendor and how much can be managed internally.
For example, for Shaw Wallace, one of the India's leading liquor companies, the mandate was to make the organisation far more efficient, bring down costs at all levels, monitor performance on a daily basis and other parameters which eventually helps it to do better business in the market place.
He said one of the main differentiators of Wipro's consulting practice from others was the domain knowledge, the tech skills and process orientation, which is driven by Six Sigma.
"For Wipro itself, Six Sigma initiative has lead to savings of around Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) in 2001-02," Nagarajan said.
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