Ever since Vivek Paul quit Wipro [Get Quote] as its vice-chairman during mid-2005, Wipro Technologies, the flagship arm of the $5 billion software major, was run under the active stewardship of Azim Premji himself who was ably supported by a team of senior officials. Sudip Banerjee, Suresh Vaswani, A L Rao, Sudip Nandy and T K Kurien were the men who led this business.

On Friday (April 18), Premji in a clear signal of giving more powers to the management, elevated Girish Paranjape and Suresh Vaswani as joint CEOs of Wipro Technologies, which reported a topline of $4.3 billion. Excerpts from an interview with them:

Given that the Indian software industry is facing a possible slowdown in the US economy, how do you plan to take this division ahead?

Vaswani: It's true that the 35 per cent growth pattern, which the Indian software industry has been showing during the past decade, is history now. There is no doubt that there are significant changes in how clients are thinking about IT budgets.

They are taking a closer look at discretionary spends and are pushing for transformational deals. They are discussing with us on we can jointly spruce the balance sheet rather than just take care of an application. We are looking at this as an opportunity as we grow up the value chain with our strong global delivery model and strong integration capabilities.

Your fourth quarter numbers are muted. Can you please walk us through how the margin expansion will take place going forward?

Paranjape: Out utilisation is currently at 75 per cent and there is enough headroom to raise this. We can further leverage our offshore component in the delivery model by adding volume growth which we anticipate.

Can you please elaborate on the strategy to carve out a consulting vertical?

Paranjape: The consulting element was embedded across our various businesses. What we are doing is bringing various dispersed pieces under a single umbrella. The objective of this business will include upstream business transformation consulting, building IT strategy for customers and helping clients build business solutions that leverage IT.
This single consulting face will have about 1,000 consultants spread across Americas, EMEA, India and APAC.

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