We have to also change and make our business more complex and more rewarding to us and our clients. So, there are two challenges and two opportunities.

Given the enormity of the opportunities and the tasks at hand, we just felt it was worthwhile to have two of us trying to drive this rather than leave it to one individual to try and [everything].

And from a very personal perspective, it can get very lonely at the top. So, having two people helps.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Suresh, what do you think?

Vaswani: I would just completely endorse what Girish said -- that, really, given the size of our business and the ambitions that we have for [it], two is certainly better than one. So, we've spoken about the power of two, and we do believe that the power of two will help us so far as we are concerned, given our environment.

We have two things. One is that two brains are better than one when it comes to long-term strategic thinking, and I think that will be great. And we are used to working with each other. And second is, you just need that much more bandwidth. I mean, given the sort of growth we want to drive -- 35% growth here in India, the ambitions that we have for our business in terms of being one of the top 10 IT service providers -- you also need good, strong bandwidth available.

I think the power of two -- given the fact that we have strong experience working with each other and given the fact that we are from a Wipro culture, which has a lot to do with teaming -- can be extremely powerful.

India Knowledge@Wharton: You both spoke about working well together. In the years that you have worked together, have there been times when the two of you have disagreed? And if so, how did you resolve those disagreements?

Paranjpe: We have worked together for many years and there have been times when we have disagreed. But, those have been mostly professional disagreements rather than any personal animosity. And that, I think, can happen among any two professionals. So, I don't think that's a sign of any weakness or any sign of worry. In fact, if you have good professional respect for each other, it's a good way to think forward.

And we don't want both of us thinking exactly alike, because then there's no advantage [to working together].

Vaswani: I completely agree with what Girish is saying -- and maybe we're agreeing too much, but I think that's the plus, actually. I may have a different viewpoint and Girish may have a different viewpoint, [but] we do realize that we're driven by the same goal, which is the goal of Wipro. So, the best decision emerges.

The best decision emerges when there are some counter views, when there's some amount of debate. Then, the right call gets taken. And what I've seen over the last three or four weeks that we've worked together, it's not that we're on the same page on everything, but finally the decision we have taken is the right decision. So, I think that is clearly, clearly bearing out.

Aron: In our interview with Mr. Premji, he commented that the two of you and he will form a sort of consultative committee that meets once a month for an hour or so. This structure of having collective leadership seems to be much more prevalent in Indian IT companies ... much more so than in Indian manufacturing or financial services companies.

There was Cognizant, with a North American CEO and an Indian CEO in charge of delivery. Then there's Infosys, which has three or four people actively managing at the top. And now, there's Wipro. So, what is it? Is it IT companies? Is it India? Or an intersection of both? What do you think, Suresh?

Vaswani: I would say it's the intersection of both. But, I would still give more emphasis on the IT companies simply because we've grown from almost being nowhere in so far as the map of the world is concerned in the context of IT to being very, very significant players, right? So, we've reached here and that's great. But, the journey over the next three or four or five years, all of us -- all the 301 IT companies -- have aspirations to be in the top 10. And, therefore, you're not really competing with each other, but you're really competing with the global players.

So, there's a lot of transformation that we will drive. The industry by itself is transforming, so what Cisco is today is not necessarily what Cisco is going to be tomorrow, just to give you an example.

Given this sort of opportunity going forward, given the sort of challenges going forward, given the sort of growth aspirations that we have, all Indian tier-one industries are talking about between 25% to 40% growth, depending on what sectors you are focusing on, depending on your ambition levels.

I think that on that sort of scale -- 100,000 people going up to 200,000 people -- the collective management is absolutely key for success. So, whether it is two, whether it is three, I think there is something in that, in terms of having a brother management team, which has more bandwidth, which takes decisions in collaboration and which is really taking large complex decisions.

Paranjpe: In many ways, the comparison that you make between the IT industry and other industries shows one big difference: That the IT industry is more like a partnership at the end, because it is part of professional services, and professional services firms can be run collegially. We cannot be run on a command and control basis, which is why it requires more collective leadership, both at the top as well as at every level of the organization.

What has happened is a natural evolution about how such firms get managed. And I think the fact that we have had longevity [in terms] of people [staying] makes it easier for people to work together rather than having to worry whether we really need a star CEO.

Vaswani: Whether there is one leader or two leaders at the top, the business invariably needs a lot of collaboration. You have heard of the vertical structure; you've heard of the service line structure. And all of that is not going to work if teams don't work collaboratively. Right?

Two people, three people at the leadership level have to really work together. So, I'm beginning to see one more angle: The big advantage of this structure is that people see [collaboration] working right at the top.

So, if Girish and I are working collaboratively, it fosters a spirit of collaboration right across the organization -- and that would be required even if there was one leader at the top. Now, I think, it will foster much more of that collaboration.

Aron: Very interesting. Is it the nature of the services industry-- for instance, consulting firms, legal firms -- that they are often run as partnerships rather than with the command and control of a CEO?

And also, the fact that you both grew with the industry as the industry grew -- so in your professional tenure at Wipro, you've seen it grow from a fairly small company to one of the most significant players in the industry. Is it that which makes it much easier for you to work together?

Paranjpe: I think there are two reasons. Because it's a professional services firm, and because it's a collegial atmosphere and because it works more like a partnership, it makes sense for us to have some kind of collective leadership at the top rather than the command and control system. Right? So, that's number one.

Number two, what makes it easier and more acceptable is because we've known each other for a long time. We know the work style, we know the strengths and weaknesses, we know where the complementarily exists, so it is easier for us to accept that that is the way we will make it work.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Recently, some senior Wipro executives left to take high positions at [other] companies. There was some speculation in the media whether this was related to the reorganization. Is that the case, or what do you think?

Vaswani: No, it was not related to the reorganization at all. Some of the people moving out probably happened much before we were announced as the joint CEOs. So, the decisions that were taken, were taken before. It had nothing to do with the restructuring.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Looking beyond the restructuring into where you see opportunities, could you tell us a little bit about where would you want to drive Wipro? There was some discussion about making it one of the top five players in the IT space. What would be your vision of how to go about it?

Paranjpe: If you look at it historically, seven or eight years ago, [we were] dwarfed by our global competitors. ... If you look at the journey from then to now, I think we have largely overcome the scale issue. ... If you look at the number of employees, look at our client base, our significance in the marketplace, I think we are fairly comfortable that in terms of pure scale and size, we are in the reckoning set. I'm not saying we have to stop worrying, but I don't think that's a major issue for us anymore.

So, the next issue, having overcome the scale issue, is really a sophistication issue. Where are the client relationships, where are the boardroom relationships, where is the sophistication of work that we do with clients? Where is the sophistication of contracting that we do with them? What's the level of ownership that we [have] of the work that we do for them?

So, that's the next hurdle that I would say that we have to cross. And that is both a hurdle and an opportunity, and it requires work at multiple levels. It requires work at building deeper client relationships and basically extending our client base. I think, extending the client base is not about adding 100 more clients, it's about [extending] within the same top clients. How do you go beyond the CIO? How do we get to know the CFO, the line of business heads, the CEO, the chief operating officer, so that we become much more comfortable as a provider to do business with, rather than being solely supported by one of the CXOs?

So, extending our relationship base within the client is one of the top things that we have to do. Linked to that is how do we extend our ability to provide, not only more services, but how do we integrate that and take it to the next level of sophistication. So, building our own competency and ability to integrate services and take it to the next level is the second thing that we have to do.

And linked to that is how do we enrich our talent pool? Today, when all is said and done, our talent is largely technology oriented, largely execution driven. How do you go from being largely technology oriented and execution driven to being more business driven and much more consultative?

So, those are the three big challenges that we need to overcome to be able to go to the next level where we can say we have done it all.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Anything you want to add to that, Suresh?

Vaswani: A few things. Clearly, we want to drive towards being in the top 10 first. And we are there in the top 10 on various parameters. What we want to do is to make sure that from every perspective, we are in the top ten. So that's one of the big priorities that we have. A lot of what Girish said is towards driving them.

Second is, we've given that cost transformation to customers. We want to do a lot more transformation in addition to costs, delivery transformation, business model transformation and so on and so forth.

So, our thrust is not only being a strong IT service or IT solution company, but move from that to being a company that is able to drive transformation insofar as customers are concerned. I'm talking about business transformation. That, I think, is a key driver for us to really hold our place in the top 10 IT services companies in the world.

There are certain, very unique differentiators that we have. For example, infrastructure services are a big differentiator for us. Business process outsourcing is a big differentiator for us, and we are strong in application. Right? How we get all of these three coherently in front of the customer and give that big transformational benefit to customers is a challenge, or is an opportunity and a challenge that we have, and we need to really capitalize on that.

There are certain segments -- for example, if you look at Wipro, we are a very, very dominant player in our own domestic market, which really means we're competing only with the global players there, because none of the domestic, most of the Indian global players don't have a significant presence.

That's another big opportunity that we have, in terms of being absolutely the lead player there, and actually driving a lot of innovation there. Because a lot of innovation is happening in India. And that innovation is applicable globally as well.

And, given the fact that we have a very, very major presence in some of the emerging markets, we do see cost structures emerging there, which are truly transformational. We see delivery structures emerging there, which are truly transformational, which can also have applicability to the global market. So, I think, there's a lot that we have going for us. We have a unique set of assets, unique width of services; we have been early insofar as investing in domain capability is concerned.

Now, we are driving a lot more on the consulting side. The idea is really to get all this together much more strongly in front of customers, which would also mean some transformation in our field force. We should project ourselves more strongly than perhaps we have been. All these steps will enable us to realize our vision of being in the top 10.

Aron: You mentioned about becoming a strategic partner to your clients. It's not just that you are going to give a cost transformation, which you've already done, but you also want to do business transformation. So, the short question is: do your clients see you as somebody that can drive organizational change and business transformation today?

Vaswani: Customers are asking that capability from us. So, it is not that we don't have credibility, having delivered all that that we have done to customers. Customers today expect us to do it right, want us to do it. And that's the good news. We don't have to go back, we don't have to go and establish credibility with customers. Most customers, given that we have delivered a range of services to them, and delivered them successfully, they have seen our transformational capability; I think they are telling us that 'Look, you must do this. You must be in the area of consulting. You must give us more business transformational value.'

So, we don't have a problem in the context of credibility. I think what we need to do is to build a lot more of that capability and deliver it to our customers.

Paranjpe: I'll second what Suresh said. If you look at it historically, for example, global competitors came from a different world. They were accountants. They were auditors. And then they, over time, transformed into management consultants. So, as long as you have a track record of having delivered what you promised, clients are willing to give you a shot at applying something new.

And as long as you do that in collaboration with them, and you do invest ahead of time and take a measured step, you will get there.

Aron: Are you able to recruit the kind of talent that you [need]? I don't mean the lateral senior people that you are bringing in from peer companies such as Cap Gemini or Deloitte, but at the campus level, are you able to recruit from the broad campuses of the U.S. or of India? Are you able to recruit the kind of students that want to go into consulting as a career? Are you able to attract them to Wipro?

Can you go to the IIMs and the ISVs and the Whartons, the Stanfords, and say, 'We are a consulting career choice?'

Paranjpe: That's a journey that we have just started on. It's too early for me to say, yes we can do that, because we have not tried it really with sufficient investment and sufficient zest, I would say.

But, I think what is clear to almost all the people that I encounter, whether it is clients, whether it is employees, or potential employees, is that most see writing on the wall. They know that in the world we are part of the future.

And if they want to build a long-term career in professional services, we are definitely in the reckoning list. So, it could be short sighted for them not to give us a shot.

Vaswani: I would support that. The fact of the matter is that we are able to attract, on lateral basis, some of the best people from the industry. There is no logical reason as to why we cannot go back to the campus where these people came from and [attract people from there].

If you are referring to Indian management schools, we do hire from some of the best schools. Some of us are also from the best schools. There is a lot of IIM Ahemedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta even within the top management of Wipro, and that by itself is a pull to some of the people that we want to hire.

Globally, I think, we need to do a bit more in terms of establishing a brand on campuses, in the context of consulting. Because globally, I'm talking about U.S. campuses, perhaps people see us still as strong IT services providers with a global delivery or offshore delivery model from India. And I think we've gone well past that. I think we need to do a lot more branding activity in terms of some of the global campuses. And I am sure people will see the logic, see the reason of coming and working with us.

Wipro Chairman Azim Premji: 'The Next Challenge
Is to Globalize Our Leadership Much More'

Published: June 12, 2008 in India Knowledge@Wharton

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4297

Wipro, India's third-largest software services firm, announced in April the appointment of Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani as the company's co-CEOs. At the 2008 Wipro Mandala event (an annual meeting that brings together Wipro employees and clients), held in Miami last month, India Knowledge@Wharton and Ravi Aron, senior fellow at Wharton's Mack Center for Emerging Technologies, spoke with Wipro Chairman Azim Premji about the company's new leadership structure. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:

India Knowledge@Wharton:  Let's start by talking about the reorganization at Wipro recently. What do you see as the principal leadership challenge that Wipro faces today and how is it better served by having two CEOs rather than one?

Premji: The principal challenge we face is to go up the value- and domain-skill chain and build a strong consultancy front end and, also, to globalize our leadership much more. We have done a decent job in globalizing the population which works overseas. I think the next challenge is to globalize our leadership much more.

The reason we did this reorganization was to put people who run the company in the saddle. We believe that two people who have worked together for more than 10 years and been in the company for more than 15 years would be able to work very well as a team. The fact that 75% of our revenues come from global markets, the fact that we are growing at 30% a year in a service, highly people-intensive industry, we figured that a two-man team at the top would be stronger than one man at the top. I continue to be Executive Chairman, but they are the joint CEOs of our IT business. It also gave us an opportunity to marry together much tighter, our domestic and Middle East IT business and the global IT business. We'll be able to bring across synergies to the two businesses much stronger.

India Knowledge@Wharton: What pros and cons did you weigh in deciding upon your current leadership structure? How do you envisage the division of labor between the two co-CEOs working in relation to you than it was, say, when you had one CEO -- Vivek Paul?

Premji:  In a way, I became the co-CEO with Vivek Paul because he was based in California. He made about seven visits a year to India and spent less than 15% of his time in India. So I don't think that's really a fair comparison. The other fact is that we were less than one-third our size at that point in time, and he never looked after the domestic and Middle East IT business. His operations were limited to the global IT business, which was one-third the size at that point of time.

The cons, I suppose, are that we must make sure that the two people work as a team. If they don't work as a team and they don't work seamlessly, it can be harmful to the organization. We must ensure that the teams under them, the direct teams under them, also work as teams and don't play cross politics in the process of having two co-chief Executives. We have formed a single council consisting of myself and them, and we plan to meet for maybe an hour every month, to go over issues that require to be discussed.

Though this is not a conventional model, maybe about 5% of global companies do have a system of joint or co-chief executives. Oracle has such a system now -- and the company's most brilliant success of Oracle come through this revised structure. Larry Ellison is the chairman but he does not run the company any more; two co-chief executives run the company. The same thing now has been announced by SAP. There are many other companies also that have this system. Interestingly, many Indian companies where there's a father-and-son combination are being run as joint CEO organizations because the father has not given up running the company and the son is actively involved in running the company, and there is division of responsibilities.

We have been careful to see to it that certain functions are jointly managed. We believe functions like finance, HR, strategic planning or technology have to service both of them seamlessly. But there also are businesses they run where they have single-point responsibility for that business on their shoulders. I think that arrangement will work well. That is my personal judgment because I have seen them working well together. When they work as a team, the sum of the parts will be more than one plus one.

Aron: You mentioned family businesses in India where the father runs the company but the next generation also is actively involved in the company. What's interesting about India is the disproportionate number of IT firms that have joint CEOs of some form of a collective leadership model. At Infosys, for example, [former CEOs] N. R. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani work closely with the new CEO, Kris Gopalakrishnan. Mastek has a collective leadership...

Premji:  There are three joint CEOs there -- it's actually a fact.

Aron: Cognizant was set up with a North American head of business and an Indian head of business. What is it about the nature of information technology companies in India that they seem to have a disproportionate number of these collective leadership structures? Does it have something to do with the nature of these companies, or India, or both?

Premji: One reason is the stability in top management which these firms have had for many years. As a result, many of the people who eventually become the joint CEOs have worked with one another for long periods of time. That is certainly the case with Wipro, and also with Infosys and Cognizant, where the people have worked as a team for a long period of time. So, the dynamics of how well they get along with each other has not been a major consideration. The dynamics of shared responsibility has not been a major consideration. There have been other organizations where that has not happened, where the people have not worked together, so they had to have a third person who's an arbitrator, sitting with the two of them to make them work together. I believe this happens because these relationships are team-oriented and have been built over a long period of time.

Aron:  Culturally, do you see that there has been a significant difference between companies that you mentioned now -- Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys -- and Accenture, EDS, and IBM?

Premji: At Accenture, William Green is the chairman and CEO. Green's prime focus is customers -- he focuses on Accenture's top 100 customers. The chief operating officer is Stephen Rohleder, and he virtually runs the company, A to Z, including sales, delivery, and the technology function. It's almost equally divided between two compartments. I'm not very familiar with the structure of IBM. IBM is probably a little more conventionally organized. But I do know Green at Accenture, and I know how he shares the responsibility for running the firm with the COO. He's on the road 200 days a year.

India Knowledge@Wharton:  You recently reorganized your consulting business and brought your consultants under one roof. I have two questions. The first is, what was the thinking behind that move?

Premji:  The first reason was that we needed to have common practice; it was just getting too fragmented. It was not getting an adequate enough critical mass. We were not doing enough career planning, career enrichment, career training, consultancy training. We were getting too silo-ed. For example, we had quality consulting, which did quality, and then a mixture of something else because that's what the customer asked for. We had domestic consulting, where we had 300 consultants addressing the India and Middle East market. It just focused on domestic and did very high quality work. In addition, we had consultants embedded into our verticals, very high quality people who just served that vertical or a sub-segment of that vertical.

We went through a sieve and identified consultants who would qualify as consultants -- and not as program managers or architects or domain specialists -- and we put them under a common umbrella, under one of our joint CEOs. We pulled this together from the point of view of developing common practices, common approach, common pricing and most important, common brand. We are taking the next step now in terms of building much stronger leadership for the whole team and building consulting as an approach, which we use as a major facilitator in growing, expanding and going up the value chain in our accounts. A high proportion of our consultants are being embedded into our accounts team, serving our top 75 accounts. We will use the balance of our consultants for building expertise in specific areas where we will sell consulting services.

India Knowledge@Wharton:  My follow up question is, how much of a challenge is it for a firm like Wipro, which has traditionally focused on design, implementation and execution of IT services, to start doing the kind of consulting that, say, Accenture or IBM -- through acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers -- would do? Do you have to acquire a significant amount of talent from the domain in which your customers exist, which is North America and European Union? Like, there's a senior executive from CAP Germany who was introduced today. So, do you expect to see a lot more of that happening? Acquiring talent from the US, adding from there?

Premji:  If you were to classify it in a strict sense, only about 20% of Accenture's total revenue comes from consultancy. I mean, if you use ERP consultants and you call them consultants, we have many ERP consultants, we have 5,000 of them, but we don't call them consultants.

So, you have to go through a sieve. If you go through the sieve and apply the standards we are applying, 20% of Accenture's business comes from consultancy. And that's been borne out by analyst reports also. If you analyze it, about 3% of our revenue comes from that definition of consultancy.

What we are doing is we are putting in significant training into the people we have currently to upgrade their skill resources, upgrade the presentation resources and upgrade what we expect from them in terms of not business as usual. We are also recruiting. We are recruiting from campus and we are recruiting from peer groups where we find consultants who have got a more integrated approach to solutions like we require.

So, typically, companies like Pricewaterhouse, companies like Accenture, would be target companies where people have... Deloitte, CapGermany would be target companies, which would bring that profile.

There's a significant part of the 3% or 3.5% consultancy work, which we do is one-to-one comparable with what Accenture does. Two years from today and three years from today, all of it will be comparable in terms of what we will do. And we find it a major facilitator for building brand, a major facilitator for building relationships and a major facilitator for being much more proactive in terms of thought leadership with our large customers.

So, it's very much part of an integrated approach, where you go to a customer. You take a typical customer X who has 1,000 applications running and he could probably downsize it to 150 applications, doing exactly the same thing. You can put together a platform for him where you are able to re-engineer his processes, identify his IT processes and then run his processes for him.

So, we are putting together and building a platform, which can facilitate doing that on a more standard basis, at a much higher standard output and a much higher productivity, with ends which are much more customizable.

But, typically, a consultant embedded into an energy account would be the top leadership person who works with that customer, along with his code team, and along with the relationship partner for that account and put together the solution. And they proactively tell the customer, this is what we can do.

So, even if the customer eventually goes for an RFP, which is maybe 1/3 of the cases, you have a distinct advantage in that you have started the process with him six months earlier. So, your understanding of the terrain is that much better.

India Knowledge@Wharton: Let us turn now from organizational issues to Wipro's strategy going forward. As you know, Indian companies have been very active in acquisitions. At Wipro, what If we think about Wipro's zone strategy, what kind of acquisitions do you think make the most sense for you looking forward 18 to 24 months and what would be some of the strategic rationale for those acquisitions?

Premji:  Let me limit myself to the IT business. Otherwise, it will get just very complex for the constituent audience. We have done in the IT business about, I think, nine or 10 acquisitions for the past two or two-and-a-half years. They've all been with a specific strategic focus in mind. We have not done any acquisition for accretion or to just multiply sales. So, if you look at it, the acquisitions have accounted over the past two years for maybe about 3.5 to 4% of our growth rates and not more than.

So, if we are growing at 30% or 32%, the acquisitions have topped it by another three or 3.5%. The approach is that we identify areas where we need an expertise to be taken from the market because it's faster. We target a candidate or set of candidates where we want a jumpstart in a particular geography. Like, we're now looking specifically for an acquisition in Germany.

Because we are small in Germany, we are very large in UK; the German market is the same size as the UK market. We can grow it organically, but it will take us five years. If we can get the seat of a good acquisition, we can do it in two or three. But, we want to get into a different kind of a segment of the business, which integrates with the rest of our business. Info crossing where we bought the data center company was typically we're the leaders from India in infrastructure support.

We found that in large, complex projects, customers were demanding that they needed to have local data centers where they could place the equipment. They wanted it for security reasons, they wanted it for touch and feel reasons, which is why we did that acquisition. It cost us $600 million.

So, that's a very clear purpose through which we are doing acquisitions. We've identified five areas for the next 18 months, which we are focusing on, where we are searching. Maybe, more than half of them will be companies we sought out. They did not flow to us through investment bankers.

We may have used investment bankers, but that was to facilitate the process of negotiation. The identification, the report building was initially done by us.

India Knowledge@Wharton:  The terrain, the US economy has been really slow. In fact, Warren Buffett said the other day that even if it may not officially be a recession, it feels like a recession to a number of people. Considering the amount of revenues that Indian IT firms get from the US market, how do you see this affecting Indian IT companies and even Wipro specifically?

Premji:   I think, in this particular slow down in the economy, the sector which got affected the most was the financial solutions sector, because of a major shake out, write offs, layoffs which are taking place and a huge amount of change in leadership.

I think, a huge amount of change in leadership has affected decision-making in these companies. I think that leadership now seems to have settled in and we see it as more write-offs. It's a new leadership, which is really shaking out. I believe that in another two or three months, financial solution companies will be back to action in terms of what they have to do, including in the IT area.

They would probably not focus on discretionary projects. But, any solutions you can give them  which take costs out, which increase productivity, which address solutions they have not thought of, will be more than easily taken up.

So, if anything, I see the second half of our financial year, which is the third quarter of the American calendar year, being fairly strong in terms of demand, or at least, definitely back to normal in terms of demand.

The second industry which has got partially affected because of sentimentality is the retail industry. But, there also we are seeing some stabilization coming back and you are seeing this from consumer purchase data also that seems to have signaled the downward curve is over.

I personally don't think that the growth of the Indian IT industry, which was last year 28%, will be affected. If anything, BPO requirements are going to go, because that's the area of maximum cost take-outs. They just require that bold step, that I have to make that bold step. When you are under pressure you make the bold steps faster, you don't make the bold steps slower.

I don't think that the growth of the IT industry, including the BPO industry in India would fall to much below 25% this financial year, maybe 24%. If it is 24%, the sky has not fallen.

India Knowledge@Wharton:  We have time for one last question.

Aron:  So, financials and retails have grown ahead of company average. Those are two big areas of growth. As we go forward, healthcare is set to grow at a very, very rapid clip. By 2012, it is actually going to reach the size of financial services.

What are the two or three areas in which you are looking to position Wipro for the opportunities of the future, in the near term in the three to four year period, what are the areas that you are gearing up for?

Premji:  well, one area where we think we have built a very unique position is infrastructure support, where we take on remote bases, managing the entire infrastructure -- the IT infrastructure of the customer.

Aron:  The global command center that you run?

Premji:  The global command center that we run, the data centers which we run now, which we will duplicate also in Europe, expertise, which we have built up. And offering highly managed services on that, on an SLA basis, whereby we are able to share a significant part of the productivity and cost take-outs we do with our customers.

The second area is in R&D services. We are uniquely positioned. We are the largest third-party R&D services company in the world. We believe it's a position where we stand out compared to any global competition, including western global competition.

So, if you ask me, the two strongest areas where we really stand out in terms of differentiation, these would be the two areas.

And then there are the geography opportunities. India is a huge growth market for us. And as compared to any other IT company, we're number one in India. We're head to head with IBM. One year our market share is a little more, one year their market share is a little more.

And we bid and we win large contracts. Last contract we won was SL, which was $600 million. Similarly, we won a very large contract for total outsourcing for a large retail company. In the Middle East we have a strong footprint, but we are expanding much more in the Middle East. And in Germany we want to establish a strong footprint. So, these three geographies would represent major growth engine for us -- just organically.

Knowledge@Wharton:  Very interesting. Mr. Premji, thank you very much for joining us today.

Premji:  It's a pleasure.