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Gazing at future, Wipro staff recast gets on the move

Key Software ServicesNewsGazing at future, Wipro staff recast gets on the move

Sep

30

Gazing at future, Wipro staff recast gets on the move

Wipro has started a three year exercise to befall a leaner company, kicking off its most determined restructuring effort since it started selling computers in 1981 and foretelling analogous moves in an industry that has been an inexhaustible job-creator.

India’s third-largest software company employs 1.46 lakh employees and the plan, according to people familiar with the process, is to trim down by about a third without resorting to mass layoffs of the sort that IBM and Microsoft have affected this year.

“We are looking to become around 100,000-strong.This is the plan or ambition, but it depends on how effectively we can deploy automation,” said one of the sources.

“The pyramid structure will give way to an hour-glass kind of structure,” he said, indicating that Wipro wants a trim middle

Wipro – a before time mover

The managerial ET spoke to agreed to talk about the issue of Wipro’s reorganization only on condition of anonymity and with the perceptive that the company has no intent of sacking employees to attain its goal. A spokesman turned down the comment. For about a decade-and-a-half, the information technology services industry has been a pouring force for generating jobs in the formal economy. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies have assisted to create a novel middle class and set up India’s reputation as one of the world’s knowledge hubs.

Now, the speed of hiring by software services companies is slowing, however novel opportunities are also opening up in the form of jobs at startups. Although Wipro is one of the early movers trying to manage with the structural changes in the technology business, experts said the software services industry — it employs about 3 million in India — is heading in the same direction.”

The model of mass hiring from campuses is dying,” said Swami Manohar, a former computer science professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and founder of Limberlink Technologies, an engineering education startup. “We are already seeing many engineering colleges shutting down, and unless there is an alteration within these colleges, companies will stop going to campuses altogether.”

The worth of engineering education is an anxiety for companies, but the massive change is that they are capable to do more with less, mainly in areas such as software testing and maintenance of computer infrastructure. At Wipro, automatic tools are feasible to make their continuation felt significantly in two departments — supervising of computer infrastructure and administration, which in cooperation employ 48,000. The monitoring department makes up about one-fifth of Wipro’s workforce now, and it is observed making up around 5% of the company’s headcount in three years.

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