Wipro Makes a Necessary Move

Wipro is coming to America, and Romania, and Egypt.

It used to be that Wipro was an Indian company employing mostly Indians in India and that when they did an outsourcing deal with you, they would offshore the work to India.

Times are changing though. An increasing number of potential outsourcing clients are becoming disillusioned with offshoring (especially for software development work). The reasons can vary, but include:

• Development overhead that wipes out most of the financial gains
• Finding that senior development staff is better suited to coding than directing Indian subcontractors
• Time zone hassles
• Language barriers
• Employee retention issues

I can’t say that I think this is a bold or innovative move. This is something that Wipro has to do or they will not be able to compete with IBM, CSC, Accenture, HP/EDS, etc.

While doing a process analysis for a large UK-based financial and healthcare software company I personally witnessed some of the drawbacks and the company’s reactions to them.

The fact is that as more commercial and internal software development moves to using agile methodologies, companies will require any external partners to be in the same country or even the same time zone or possibly even the same building.

This is one more proof point that the world is not as flat as people once thought. In this undulating world, success will come in part from differentiating between times when the world is flat and when it is round.

What do you think?