That’s according to Chief Executive Thierry Delaporte, who in the first year of his tenure has led the Bengaluru-based IT services firm
to clock revenues rivalling larger peers.
“Wipro employs over 80,000 cloud professionals, and more than 10,000 of our colleagues are now certified by leading cloud-service providers,” said Delaporte. “We have employed more than 40,000 trained professionals in AI over the last few months…built a workforce of 7,500 specialists in the cybersecurity area.”
As on Sept. 30, Wipro had a total staff strength of 221,365.
The company has won over $2.4-billion worth of deals in the past four quarters, a significant chunk of which was for cloud services that now comprise a third of Wipro’s deal pipeline and generate 70% of new revenue,
Delaporte told analysts on November 19. In June, Wipro announced the launch of its FullStride Cloud Service portfolio as well as
plans to invest $1 billion in cloud capabilities, technologies, acquisitions and partnerships over the next three years. Wipro is also ramping up its crowdsourcing platform TopCoder, which gives it access to another 1.6 million data science experts.
Wipro is the first top-tier Indian IT firm that has disclosed the amount of talent deployed in a specific growth vertical. The renewed focus on cloud clients has led it to heavily ramp up this employee base, which is in high demand across the industry, analysts said.
“Wipro has a strong focus on the cloud, and they generate a substantial portion of their data centre outsourcing revenue from public cloud offerings,” said DD Mishra, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Wipro has evolved its cloud capabilities using organic and inorganic methods and has a range of tools and platforms to support this business.”
Saurabh Govil, president and chief human resources officer at Wipro, said client demand for certain skillsets far outstripped the available supply and the trend was likely to persist going forward. Wipro’s updated rewards programme for freshers now includes consistent value creation through a performance-based bonus and an increment programme.
“Stocks, both time and performance vested, are integrated into total compensation of every senior leader,” Govil had told analysts at the Nov. 19 event. “We concluded two increment cycles for our junior bands, and one for mid-senior bands in this calendar year and created disproportionate differentiation for high performance.” The company plans to hire 17,000 freshers in the current fiscal and 25,000 in the next, he said. It has also doubled its intake of non-engineer freshers through its work integrated learning programme, ET reported last month.
On Monday, Wipro shares rose 1.52% to Rs 630.40 apiece on the BSE while the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex ended the day 0.27% higher at 57,260.58 points.
