So for about a year and a half I ran a startup out of Seattle that was largely focused on Microsoft. The dot-com boom was going on, so I thought maybe it was a good time to start something of my own. Vivek: After twenty-one years, I felt that I had stayed long enough in the company. Basically, all of the business was in the area of software services. We were also doing some product work for companies such as Nortel. Vivek: It was largely application maintenance and development. Tony: What segments of the business was Wipro competing in at that point? In India we grew it to a multimillion dollar business, but here we grew it from $2 million to over half a billion dollars over ten years. Overall I spent about twenty-one years with Wipro, ten years in India and eleven years in the United States, and grew their business from the ground up. I was here in the United States with Wipro for ten years. Our positioning was that we had established a brand of hardware and some software services in India, and we can do this in the international market as well. Jack Welch knew my former bosses at Wipro and he said, “Hey, why don’t you do some services work for us you have some incredible competence.” So that led to my coming to the U.S. We were actually doing some manufacturing work for GE. When the IT services business was getting started in the United States, we had relationships with Sun and GE. I spent ten years with Wipro building their brand from ground zero in the hardware and the services marketplace. We later tied up with Sun and with Tandem. Getting printed circuit boards and assembling them, not manufacturing them. Wipro said, “Hey let’s start out something of our own.” We literally started with a garage-like operation that was tied up with a company in the United States and began manufacturing 16-bit computers. HCL and Wipro are the two remaining companies the others have disappeared from the face of India. There was a vacuum for about a year, and then couple of companies – HCL was one, Wipro was another, and there were a couple of others – became active in this area. IBM was exiting India, and there were two or three odd companies that started to serve the IT segment. India was a still largely a closed economy. Wipro was transitioning from a consumer product company to taking over a niche space that had been catered to by IBM, which was the only large IT company operating in India at that time. I was the eighth employee in Wipro back in 1980. Vivek Chopra: I spent thirty years in two organizations. Tony Scott: Vivek, to start off would you talk a little bit about your own background, how you got to where you are today, and what your organization within CSC is doing these days? His insights into how this market has evolved and is still evolving are fascinating. Vivek has a long and deep history in the IT industry in India and in the global outsourcing and off-shoring arena. I recently interviewed Vivek Chopra, one of the early employees of Wipro, former head of IBM’s Daksh services business in India, and now president of CSC’s India operations.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |