Following the untimely death earlier this year of Kirk Strawser, global consulting head at Bangalore-based Wipro (see here), the company has confirmed pro-tem head Roop Singh in the post. Singh, who re-joined Wipro in 2010, led Wipro’s consulting businesses in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific under Strawser.
Singh’s challenge – as indeed for his peers in all the India-centric offshore services firms – is to bridge the ‘cachet gap’ with Accenture, universally seen by the Indian players as an aspirational model. Wipro derives about 2.5% of its $6.2bn revenues from ‘consulting’, more or less in line with peers. While small in the grand scheme of things, the ‘pot of gold under the rainbow’ is the leverage on more traditional ‘downstream’ IT services which, when the model works, can generate two- to four-times those revenues.