Wipro keen to associate startups to drive innovation: Rishad Premji

Information technology (IT) organization Wipro Ltd is keen to associate startups in India to power innovation and virtual transformation for its clients, chairman Rishad Premji stated on Friday.

“What startups can do for India today is what IT service companies did for the last 20 years in terms of brand building, employment, and wealth creation. Companies like us are going to work with the young companies. Today, we have a new-age team at Wipro that works only with young companies that are in the range of $5-10 million,” Premji said during a discussion with Sudhir Sethi, founder and chairman of Chiratae Ventures (formerly IDG Ventures India).

Working with smaller corporations is a significant change in approach for Wipro as its typical client base includes big organizations in the range of $2-10 billion of revenue.

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“Not only are we finding ways to work with them as customers but also to partner with them or leverage their capabilities to bring them into our sphere of innovations right,” Premji said.

Premji stated many IT offerings corporations, consisting of Wipro, are also focusing on constructing productized solutions for their customers.“That does not mean we will become a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company or product company…We are looking at productized solutions that we can couple with our services and take to offer our customers.”

Wipro is keen to tap the special pockets of innovation in diverse elements of the broader ecosystem. Wipro works with about forty new-age corporations in India in unique capacities.

“We have an external innovation group based in India that works with young companies outside of Wipro ventures, because we can partner with a company without investing in them,” Premji said.