India-based IT behemoth ready to flex its muscles
She is the CEO of Calgary-based ATCO Ltd., one of Canada’s largest conglomerates with assets in the energy, pipeline, utilities, manufacturing and logistics sectors.
He is the chairman of Wipro Ltd., a Bangalore, India-based information technology (IT) services giant. He’s also one of the world’s wealthiest tycoons with an estimated net worth of some $19.1 billion US.
When ATCO’s Nancy Southern and Wipro’s Azim Premji crossed paths a couple of years ago at a meeting of the Geneva- based World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the conversation proved timely for both.
ATCO had been mulling the possible sale of its Edmonton-based IT services unit, ATCO I-Tek, which wasn’t considered part of its core business.
Meanwhile, Wipro had long been eager to establish a bigger presence in Canada, where it was still a relatively unknown player despite its massive global footprint.
With 140,000 employees on six continents and a market cap of more than $33 billion US — equal to the market value of Canada’s five largest technology companies — Wipro is a behemoth.
After two years of talks, ATCO and Wipro struck a deal last August when Wipro paid $210 million to acquire the assets of ATCO I-Tek, including its 450 Alberta employ- ees and its assets in Australia.
As part of the deal, Wipro will provide IT services to ATCO for the next 10 years, giving it a base from which to grow its revenues and customers across Western Canada.
Enter Brian Allatt, an affable Scot from Edinburgh who spent a quar- ter century with IBM and consulting giant Accenture before joining Wipro in 2006. He moved to Edmonton last summer to assume the top job at Wipro Solutions Canada and says the company is ready to make some noise.
“Our objective is to use this as a development centre and to really grow our business across all sectors, but primarily driven by the oil and gas and utilities sectors — once oil and gas picks up again,” he said.
“We have closed some additional business since we moved here with some of the engineering and construction firms, including Stantec. We’re developing a suite of Oracle (software) applications with them here in Edmonton.”
Wipro has also just cut a sizable contract with a non-energy client in Calgary, though the details won’t be announced for another two or three weeks, he said.
“Our long-term plans are to really grow our business across all industries, with Edmonton as our Western Canada operational hub. Right now this operation is larger than the one we have in Mississauga (where Wipro has about 200 staff), so Edmonton may become our Canadian headquarters.”
Wipro’s corporate history reads like a Hollywood script. Founded by Premji’s father Muhammed Hashim Premji in 1945, its initial focus was on selling vegetable oil.
When the family patriarch died in 1966, young Azim Premji, then a 21-year-old engineering student at Stanford, was called home to take over the business. He spent the next decade and a half expanding into other consumer and industrial products.
Wipro’s transformation into an IT services powerhouse really began in 1980, when the Indian government curbed the activities of big foreign players like IBM in a bid to kick-start a domestic IT industry.
Premji, smelling opportunity, refocused Wipro as an IT player and the company jumped in with both feet, riding the global outsourcing trend to spectacular growth in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s.
“Wipro and some other companies (such as Infosys) managed to really establish themselves as major IT forces,” says Allatt. “And when India liberalized again, it gave Wipro the opportunity to really extend its reach outside India.”
Today, a large percentage of Wipro’s revenues are generated across Europe, the United States and other foreign markets. Its cus- tomers include many of the world’s top companies and it works closely with major software vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, SAP and EMC.
Premji, widely lauded as India’s software king, has twice been named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.
In 2012, he became the first Indian businessman to support the Giving Pledge — a plan begun by U.S. tycoons Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that requires signatories to contribute the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.
While it once benefited mainly from outsourcing, Allatt said Wipro’s current focus is on helping clients do business in more productive and innovative ways by using analytics and big data to guide strategic decision-making.