Boardroom Despatches: The unlikely story of India’s greenfield success

When you think of the big names in IT, at some of the biggest companies, a few names normally spring to mind. I’m thinking Gates, Ellison, McNealy, Siebel. They have a number of attributes and an aggressive approach, not to mention egos to match their fortunes. But they’re all much of a muchness.

So why am I so taken aback by the man I’ve just met? He runs the world’s twelfth largest software company. He has a personal fortune worth several billion dollars. But he’s softly spoken and has as much humility as Oracle’s Larry Ellison has showmanship.

His name is Azim Premji and he is the chairman of Wipro. Wipro is known around the world now, as is fellow Indian heavyweight Infosys. What’s less talked about is the wider ecosystem of Indian tech success – and please don’t think I’m limiting myself and that country to call centres – and Wipro’s progress.

Taking the second point first, Premji took over Wipro in the 1960s. Back then it mainly sold cooking oil. At this point you might want to start to think of it as India’s Nokia, given the change of fortune an astute refocusing on tech has brought.

Since that time, the company has averaged 40 per cent compound annual growth and truly arrived on the scene. It is part of a great Indian success story. When we pulled out of India, post-colonial India wasn’t in the greatest shape but I’d argue it has now leapfrogged the UK and the rest of Europe. It is playing second fiddle only to the US in this industry.

How has that come to be? For one thing, it didn’t have a legacy of doing things a certain way in technology. Wipro and others have moved forward by often taking a greenfield approach, choosing to operate with quality from the outset.

‘Ensnare you by price, keep you with quality’ – that old adage may never be truer than with this company.

Then let’s consider the wider scene. If you go to Bangalore – as I intend to do again soon – you will find world-class organisations, offices and pipes. Every year 260,000 graduates are added to the tech talent pool. Most want to be engineers and the apex of that career is to be a software engineer.

Now cast your mind to our skills situation, one where we struggle to get anyone interested in IT at all. I’m envious.

Sure, a lot of them start out now in call centres. But they see that as a foot on the ladder. They are professional, happy to work shifts and employers benefit from length of service we can only dream about. Salaries are a sixth of those in the UK but so is the price of living.

Premji has taken this resource and tapped it with a porous culture at Wipro. It seems to be an organisation that buys niche players very carefully, then absorbs their style. An acquisition can be directional without altering things too much.

I asked him who his heroes are. He said Gandhi, Bill Gates and Jack Welch – a man who he admires because he “could think 10 years ahead”.

With an obvious exception, Premji is competing with many of those he most admires. In five years time his goal is to be boss of a top five global company.

Focusing on the customer is his key tenet – at one facility staff are even trained to talk with Texan accents to get on better with the far-off clients they serve.

Will he and Wipro make it? He already recognises China, and in particular Shanghai, as a threat down the line. But, unsurprisingly, he sees the competition as healthy.

I asked him what keeps him going. He told me: “Unfinished business.” So when will he stop? “I’ll know when it’s finished.”

And I believe him.

Rene Carayol is a former IT director and board member of IPC Media. He is now the CEO of consultancy Voodoo and co-author of the best-selling Corporate Voodoo and My Voodoo. He can be contacted at rene@carayol.com .