Mahesh Sharma | November 27, 2008
THE Gershon review has opened the door for Indian outsourcers to bid for lucrative federal Government contracts, a Wipro executive said.
Government work has so far remained off limits to Indian firms because of a requirement for staff to have a certain level of security accreditation.However, Wipro Asia-Pacific head of sales and operations, Rajat Mathur, believes Peter Gershon’s recommendations, which will be implemented in full, have eased the rules for Indian firms to bid for work.
“The Gershon review very clearly states there is a way in which outsourcing can happen for Indian companies even for the federal Government,” Mr Mathur said. “Except for defence, all the other government have opened up for outsourcing.”
Apart from potential federal Government business he said there was interest from educational and financial institutions for its services.
In late October, Origin Energy said it select Wipro to implement a new SAP billing and CRM system, and manage its application development operations.
The win was significant for Wipro because it beat a number of multinational vendors, according to Suresh Vaswani, Wipro technology business co-chief executive.
“It was really one global competitor and us that were on the final shortlist and then we just came out stronger,” Mr Vaswani said. “There were no Indian competitors.”
Origin's retail arm will completely outsource its application development to Wipro. It will implement the SAP ISU utilities billing and CRM software over the next two years, and subsequently Wipro will maintain the software for the next 10 years.
Mr Vaswani also believes there will be scope to manage Origin’s hardware infrastructure operations in future.
“This is only the beginning ... there could be other pieces. Customers tend to start looking ahead and trying to see how this relationship could grow into some of the other areas that we’ve not looked at.
“Infrastructure is a big area for us … and tomorrow the customer knows infrastructure is an area that’s possible (to outsource) as well.”
To support the deal, Wipro will build a new training centre in Melbourne and it will also fast-track plans to build a centre in Adelaide.
Mr Vaswani said these centres could eventually be used as part of Wipro’s global services delivery model.
“We have our Indian development centres, we could have our Australian development centres. We could hire people from campuses and train them up ... we could use the same set of centres for multiple customers in Australia.
“Frankly we could also leverage this centre for any of our global customers as well ... from being a typical on-site, offshore, move to onsite, near shore and offshore model.
“We don’t have too many now but going forward as we scale up and move to the next level, you’ll have a lot more Australians working for us, including in delivery and particularly on-site.”
Wipro employs about 350 people locally, and has doubled its headcount for the past couple of years. Mr Mathur said there will be some slowdown but expects to grow staff in the “high double-digits”.
“The double-digit growth is tending towards 100 per cent ... it's something we still strive to do over the coming years as well.”
As part of its recruitment strategy, Wipro signed a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Computer Society Foundation to sign on local graduates to train and work with the outsourcer.
Related link World According To Suresh Vaswani