Wipro Stakes Its Claim In U.S.

And the way he plans to do that is through Wipro's focus on embedded technologies, deep engineering and development work.

"What Accenture and the rest of the Big Five have done in terms of applications is that any CIO will truly trust these people to deliver solutions. They go to them for all their needs," Emani says. "But in the engineering space, people don't think like that. They still think everything has to be done in-house."

Emani, who's based at Wipro's headquarters in Bangalore, India, spent two weeks in the United States last month meeting clients and members of Wipro's internal sales teams. His goal: to get the message out that, by partnering with Wipro, companies can focus on running their businesses and leave the hard-core engineering and product-development work to the experts in his company.

"If we can reach that kind of positioning where people will trust us the way the Big Five are trusted, I will be happy," Emani says.

Enhancing your company's reputation to match those of the world's leading IT services firms is a hefty challenge, indeed. But fortunately for Emani, his company has some real firepower to back his aspirations. Wipro Technologies, after all, is the global technology services division of Wipro Limited, based in Bangalore, India.

The larger corporation, which got its start more than two decades ago in the hydrogenated cooking-fats industry and later expanded into consumer products and technology development, made a name for itself in recent years via its offshore development model, not to mention the behind-the-scenes R and D work it does for clients as big as Microsoft, Compaq, NEC and Nortel Networks. What's more, Wipro is one of only a handful of publicly held IT firms whose stock price has held up nicely since its IPO in 2000, with the stock trading at more than $37 a share in early April. It's currently the largest IT services firm in India, with a $9.6 billion U.S. market cap.

Wipro Technologies' business accounts for roughly 85 percent of the larger entity's revenues. Its solutions are broken down into three categories: IT services for enterprise customers, product-design services for hardware and software manufacturers, and solutions for service providers. And the company has a separate technology innovation group back in India that focuses solely on developing intellectual property.

"The competitive landscape is quite diverse," says Ayan Mukerji, vice president, North America, for embedded and Internet-access solutions. "But we position ourselves differently in that we are not a pure-play IP player. We use the IP to wrap around our services and offer an integrated solution."

Among the companies' IT services verticals are banking and finance, government, health care, insurance, manufacturing and retail. And the company is doing a lot of work lately developing Linux solutions, specifically on behalf of product manufacturers looking to reduce licensing costs. "In fact, we have been working with some Japanese players even at the printer level that want to build Linux-based printers," Emani says. Despite the hype over Linux in the enterprise space, Emani says it's still too early for wide adoption at that level. "We can help companies in terms of porting applications to Linux, making the performance better, etc.," Emani says. "But we are not seeing as much of an interest there. That will come over time."

Emani concedes that Wipro has a long way to go to get its message out in the United States. While he thinks the company is well-known in Silicon Valley, it needs to do more to increase brand awareness on the East Coast,specifically in areas like Boston and New York. "Our listing in the NYSE about a year-and-a half ago has helped us a lot, but we need to increase our brand awareness." n