Other Indian IT services companies have permanent U.S. employees, but Wipro's been more aggressive than most. It's acquired a number of outsourcing companies in the United States and other developed markets, small companies to bulk up industry knowledge. It's hired people out of industry, as other outsourcers have. But most distinct is Wipro's bulk hiring of U.S. graduates, who it will train as it does its India new hires. If it opens the two other East Coast centers, that's as many 1,500 U.S. college grads. It chose Atlanta, and is eyeing the two other sites, based on having solid tech universities and being communities where Wipro thinks it can best retain people.
Wipro looks a few years down the road and believes it will need more people close to the customer to work on innovation efforts like process change and new product rollouts. "In three years time, given the right exposure, they'll form a tremendous amount of our front-end teams, which is an alternate supply chain from just making lateral hires," says N.S. Bala, senior VP of manufacturing solutions.
Wipro's still an India-centric company. Even as it talks of hiring 500 to 1,500 grads in the U.S., it's adding a building here in Bangalore that'll add about 3,000 employees, bringing the total just on this sprawling campus to around 20,00. But it contends the U.S. hiring will be part of how it differentiates itself. "Globalization of our delivery model is something we're doing at a very aggressive pace," says Bala. "And I think that'll be a big difference in how we deliver our services going forward."