Large deal momentum demonstrates strength and capabilities of Wipro: CFO Jatin Dalal

Large deals are definite accelerators for the revenue growth. They are also real opportunities in the market. It also demonstrates full suite of strengths and capabilities large player like Wipro has. So for all those reasons, it is extremely critical for us to continue to participate and win large deals.

Following are the number of steps we have taken.

We have a separate group of large deals team under chief growth officer (a new role), which works closely with strategic market units for large deal creation, solution and winning.  We also worked on partnerships, where we are able to collectively take an answer to our customers that are far more strategic to them.

We are very committed to this and we will continue to make investments in this place.

Your margins are at 22 quarters high? Do you see the new operating model that came into effect on January 1, 2021 impacting it?

Our margins are now at a 22 quarters high. The expansion was led by improved revenue growth trajectory and excellence in operations with several metrics at an all-time high.

But we are not seeing any big shift because of structural change nor do we see any cost saving on account of it. The idea really is to realign the investments into the new structure and make those investments far more effective on what it can do for us in terms of order booking.

With the reorganization, are there any new metrics to measure digital?

Digital or definition of new services will be something that we will unveil in Q4. We are thinking through that as a part of this reorganization and structural change that we have done. For the time being we can tell you that we have seen significant sequential growth in some of the digital services that we highlight as high growth service internally. We have seen significant increase in order booking of cybersecurity services on year-on-year basis.

We are making rapid strides in new services but we have not yet specifically called out a new metric. We will be calling it out at the end of Q4 or beginning of Q1.

At the back of COVID-19, offshoring has increased. Do you see that continue?

Offshoring is much better than pre-COVID levels today. We have improved by nearly six percentage points as a composition of revenue. Because of the pandemic there was great shift to offshore, which will normalise in future as travel opens up. Some of that may go back to business as usual in onsite/offshore mix in 6-9 months

What would be Wipro’s work from home (WFH) strategy?

We continue to operate 92-93 percent WFH. That I think will continue in Q4 as well. However we will take a more calibrated call around how that changes between FY21 and FY22 as we spend more time to understand what are the work models that would acceptable to customers, what are the work models that are both effective and efficient for us and our employees.

How does the whole team dynamics playout in the future? Because there can’t be one ideal scenario that could emerge for the type of project that is agile and development and one which is maintenance of large applications. We will have to stratify this question and then look at specific answers in individual strata.

Have decision cycles improved?

We see much better decision cycle now than what we had seen in Q1 and Q2. We are back to normal. I would even venture out to say that it is faster than what we have seen in the past.

Where are the client investments coming in?

We are seeing all round need for technologies, definitely cloud, digital transformation, cybersecurity, data and engineering are some of the immediate need businesses or services for our customers. But really traction is all around and not specific to one area, including digital operations where we have done fabulously.