Wipro Announces Legacy Migration Initiative Based on Oracle(R) Tuxedo

New Capabilities Simplify Legacy Migration Initiatives; Help Reduce Cost, Risks and Accelerates Migration

BANGALORE, India, Jun 30, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited (WIT 11.94, -0.04, -0.33%), today announced the launch of consulting and re-hosting implementation service offerings for migration of applications running on legacy environments to Oracle's Tuxedo platform. These new services leverage the Oracle Tuxedo product portfolio to accelerate and simplify legacy migrations.

Legacy modernization is an important customer priority, given the large investment customers have in business-critical legacy applications. In an environment of constrained IT budgets, companies can no longer afford to spend a majority of their IT budgets on maintaining legacy infrastructure, which crowds out investments in new business priorities. Re-hosting legacy applications -- moving them intact from the legacy environment and migrating them to open systems without impacting business logic or data -- is an attractive migration approach. It can significantly reduce the cost, time and risk of migration and can enable customers to begin realizing savings within 12-18 months.

These new offerings enable customers to benefit from Wipro's strong abilities to deliver migration projects on the Oracle stack using industrialized methodology and automated tooling for predictable, on-time, and on-budget delivery. Wipro's specialized Centre of Excellence for Legacy Migration provides skilled resources, best migration practices and reusable rehosting and modernization frameworks to accelerate legacy migration and modernization initiatives. Oracle proven technology gives customers the confidence to migrate mission-critical applications.

Oracle Tuxedo Application Re-hosting Workbench 11g and Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch 11g can help dramatically reduce migration cost, risk, project length and complexity with most legacy applications re-hosted on open systems 'as-is.' Customers can confidently migrate their applications to enable significant reductions in the cost of running online and batch applications while protecting their investment in business logic and data, and improving scalability and business continuity.

"Wipro is excited to work with Oracle to provide service offerings for migration of legacy applications to Oracle's robust and proven stack," said K R Sanjiv, Senior Vice President, Business Technology Services, Wipro Technologies. "The new solution will help reduce the change involved in the migration process, allowing us to deliver more effective migration services. Hence, our customers can now see migration results more quickly, realize savings, and leverage these savings towards additional modernization initiatives."

"Oracle Tuxedo Application Re-hosting Workbench 11g and Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch 11g can dramatically streamline the migration process by providing an automated re-hosting toolset that enables more effective migration services with greater predictability, lower risk, and faster ROI," said Frank Xiong, Vice President of software development, Oracle. "Wipro can now help deliver migration projects faster and more effectively to our joint customers. This helps customers quickly achieve significant cost reductions, improved performance, flexibility, reliability, and scalability of Oracle Tuxedo and related product offerings."

Source: Marketwatch

Wipro's solution wins Global Product Excellence 2010 Award

19 Apr 2010, 1951 hrs IST,PTI BANGALORE: WiproTechnologies, global IT services business of Wipro Limited, on Monday announced that its Identity Access Management (IDAM) Solution, IDAM-in-a-Rack has won the Global Product Excellence Award 2010 in 'Identity Management Solution' Category recently in San Francisco. The award, instituted by Info Security Products Guide, the world's leading publication on security-related products and technologies, recognises security and IT vendors with advanced, ground-breaking products and solutions that help set the bar higher in all areas of technologies, a company statement said. 'IDAM-in-a-Rack' has been built by Wipro Enterprise Security Solutions (ESS) team gleaned from Wipro's experience in successful IDAM implementations for various global customers over the years. The solution's architecture, market leadership, profitability and revenue growth were strong positives for the award. "As cyber security threats continue to affect businesses worldwide, the protection of networks remains a critical requirement for any organization," says Sana Madan, Executive Editor of Info Security Products Guide. Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

India losing ground to Latin America in voice-based BPO

By Chandan Das on April 9th, 2010

Believe it or not, India, which has remained the most favored destination for foreign firms to establish BPO centers, is fast losing ground. According to industry experts, dearth of superior personnel in the voice-based BPO sector has actually forced many Indian IT/ BPO service providers like TCS, Infosys and Wipro to set up facilities abroad.

Today, most Indian IT/ BPO service providers are opting for the Latin American nations, such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Peru, which offer a ready workforce of quality voice ability. In fact, firms like TCS, IBM, Accenture and Unisys have established call centers in these countries by now making the Latin American region a favored destination for IT and BPO services.

A financial news website reports that while Infosys and TCS have already established new facilities in the Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Wipro was the latest Indian IT and BPO service provider to set up its new international delivery hub at Curitiba in Brazil to offer services to its domestic as well as international clients. In fact, the new center at Curitiba will not only enhance Wipro’s IT portfolio, but also enable it to serve as many as 20 clients across the globe.

According to the chairman and managing director of Quatrro BPO Solutions, by and large considered to be the father of the BPO industry in India, Raman Roy, people in India have failed to perfect their skills. He says that though the enthusiasm to join the BPO sector in India is enormous, the second and third tier colleges in the country are merely turning out an increasing number of educated youths who cannot be employed. Hence, the standard of the BPO industry in India is far below compared to what it used to be a decade ago.

Echoing Roy’s views, the CEO and president of Omega Healthcare Management Services, Gopi Natarajan, points out that as far as the English Language skills are concerned, today’s Indian youth are far behind their counterparts in Latin American countries. Substantiating his view, Natarajan says that while the BPO firms in India provide 12 to 15 weeks’ training to the candidates, people in Colombo are all set to start work only after three to four week’s training. And the youths in Latin America are all the more proficient as a result of which the region is making rapid progress in the voice-based BPO sector. Besides, compared to the Indians, people in the Latin American nations are able to relate better with the US financial, healthcare and other systems.

In addition to the skill set of the employees, other factors, such as improved technological support, faster response time and the benefits of near-shoring, are encouraging more and more Indian IT and BPO firms to opt for the Latin American nations for setting up their new facilities. Many of the Latin American countries also have provisions for technology transfers that make these locations more advantageous for the business of the Indian IT and BPO firms. Another issue that had driven the Indian firms to overseas locations like the Latin American nations, Australia and Europe is the high rate of attrition in the BPO sector in India, which is as high as 11 per cent!

Source: SourcingLine

Wipro sets up consulting R&D arm/Sizes up its Competition

---

Technology major Wipro is planning a deep plunge into the global consulting market with the idea of competing with true-blue global consulting brands and IT consulting firms.

In preparation for this move, the company has carried out an in-depth study on select consulting majors including Ernst & Young, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, McKinsey and Bain & Company to understand what made them stay different in the consulting world.

Anurag Srivastava, head of Wipro Consulting Services (WCS) said, “The objective of the study was to gather a holistic understanding of the consulting business. We want to create differentiation in the global markets through innovation-driven consulting. Consulting will be the front-end service for most of our large business deals.”

Wipro has also set up a dedicated research and development arm, Global Research Centre, to support its initiatives in the consulting space. The R&D facility will seek to enhance the business value to clients through innovation. The company believes that consulting will work as a powerful tool during times of recession to gain customer confidence.

Wipro employs over 1,200 consulting professionals and 7% of them will now be part of the R&D team. The team will track 12 industry verticals. The research activity starts with profiling the customer, moves on to analysing industrial trends, followed by providing a macro-economic snapshot and culminating in a viable business strategy.

The job of the R&D team is to lay seeds of innovation. It will play a key role in bridging the divide between ideators and front-end workers.

“The researchers will work in tandem with consulting professionals, so that customers are increasingly benefited,” Srivastava said. “Consulting will have a significant impact on our IT/BPO revenues. It will transform us from an outsourcing player to a transformational partner.”

Sourced from Indiatimes

Wipro plans to outdo IBM

Wipro may be the third largest Indian IT company the world over, but it is eyeing the No 1 spot back at home and has got a brand new strategy to outdo the current leader in Indian market, the big blue IBM.

Anand Shankaran, business head of India and ME at Wipro Infotech, said, "There is no slowdown in India. It will be wrong to even talk about recovery."

Bullish is not quite what one expects Indian IT companies to be, given the slowdown in the west, but Wipro Infotech is banking big on the $20 billion Indian IT market.
It believes it can outgrow the current market leader IBM in a year with revenues well over billion dollars.

However, with big billion dollar deals in telecom in India drying up, IT companies are now targeting small and medium businesses, which are over 3 million in number that can add to the revenue kitty.

Wipro Infotech is approaching the SME market with renewed focus, breaking up the market into clusters, which include auto ancillary, textiles, micro finance, hospitality, toys and gems and jewellery.

"We are going to grow 15-20 per cent in India market next year, 15 per cent in products and 20 per cent in services. The idea is to aim for global operations kind of margins. We believe we can get there with critical mass in the medium term," Shankaran said.

India, Middle East and Africa are new focus areas for IT companies like Wipro and the deal pipeline company says is looking solid with 8-10 deals of over $100 million each.

Analysts believe Indian IT companies have no choice but to sharpen their strategies to tap into these growth markets.

Partha Iyengar, regional research director at Gartner India, said, “These are crucial markets. One, because there is growth and also this is where you can demonstrate transformational capabilities and finetune and then you can bag high end work in other markets."

The next big battle for growth between the global and Indian IT companies will be clearly fought in markets like India, Middle East and Africa.

No wonder Indian IT companies like Wipro, who have so far played catch up with global peers, are now putting all their might into devising strategies that will keep them ahead in the curve.

Source: NDVT Profit