Indian IT Industry Facing a Perfect Storm: Wipro CEO

Outgoing CEO of Wipro has a warning for IT companies: change. TK Kurien in an interview with NDTV Profit on the sidelines of World Economic Forum meet in Davos said, "A lot of changes are happening in technology. A lot of changes are happening in customer itself and the way we deliver services are going to change." (Watch Video)

"In many ways it is a perfect storm for every IT services provider anywhere in the world. If you look at IBM it gives you a sense of what can happen if you don't change fast enough. It is not easy and it can happen to anyone of us."

Talking about some of the changes in the tech landscape, he said, "Three years ago if you talked about cloud, it was a good thing to have. But it was never mainstream. Now, it is mainstream."

Application development and maintenance, which is the bread and butter business of Indian IT companies, will also get impacted by cloud computing, he said.

"It (application development and maintenance services) will remain in place as long as there are legacy applications out there. But the moment, people start moving bespoke applications to more cloud-based applications, we will lose business."

There is a five-to-seven-year transition period for Indian IT services companies, he added. Does it mean that the best period of IT Indian industry is over?

"If you continue to do the same kind of work that we were doing the past and the same way we were doing in the past and selling it the same way - it is over. But lot of us are not going to remain standstill. We are going to change and already changing."

Mr Kurien also said that automation will also impact the IT companies and the workforce. "Scale business will not remain the way it is. It will get automated. A lot of kind of monitoring kind of work will get automated in 2-3 years."

The middle management is the one that will get affected by the changes brought in by automation, he said. "The junior folks are coming in with tech expertise. They will remain. The very senior guys will remain. It is the middle that is under threat. "

Will automation change the hiring requirement of Indian IT companies? "You will see a stage where the hiring continues. But a lot of people who have been doing operations work for scale who have not kept up with technology, those are the guys under threat now going forward," he said.

Transition at Wipro

India's third biggest outsourcer is undergoing a leadership change. Current chief operating officer Abidali Neemuchwala will succeed T K Kurien as CEO, which Mr Kurien will become vice chairman of Wipro from February 1.

Mr Kurien said the transition at the Bengaluru-based IT major has been "very smooth as it was planned for a long time. Speaking about the CEO selection process, he said, "The whole process started roughly about two years ago. At that time we had three candidates and finally we zeroed in on Abidali Neemuchwala sometime in August-September, 2014. We finally got him on board in March 2015. So it has been a long transition."

Mr Kurien said that Wipro will announce a new roadmap in next couple of months.