Aligning assets with partners’ complementary solutions: 2019 strategy may be critical for Wipro in 2020

As we look at significant changes coming to the IT services landscape and focus on agile shifts toward a post-COVID-19 world, strategies launched in the last 12 months may prove to be critical for some vendors’ long-term success. Understanding Wipro’s February 2019 moves can point to how the company might perform throughout 2020. 

Wipro has significantly expanded its addressable market via alliances and has the opportunity to generate cross-selling momentum for strategic portfolio areas. Given Wipro’s lack of digital scale compared to peers, aligning its assets with partners’ complementary solutions will allow the company to build use cases that aid in direct-sales efforts, provided near-term initiatives focus on appealing to demand for Wipro’s emerging portfolio of value-add digital solutions and services, thereby expanding its wallet share in partner-led engagements.

Just over one year ago, Wipro expanded its alliance with Oracle by launching the QuMic platform, which accelerates integration of Oracle Cloud for clients, supporting migration of clients’ assets while also improving their ability to leverage digital tools and assets. To further strengthen its arsenal/portfolio/set of these digital-oriented solutions and platforms for clients, Wipro and Oracle deepened the partnership in November with the subsequent launch of the RAPIDS Digital Experience Platform (DXP), which caters to the evolving needs of telcos and communication service providers (CSPs). RAPIDS DXP combines Wipro’s existing DXP with Oracle’s Digital Experience for Communications solution to offer a multifaceted platform that provides CSPs with reference solutions to deploy use cases covering next-generation services like 5G, SD-WAN and IoT. Further, RAPIDS DXP offers an integrated digital experience omnichannel solution, allowing telcos to better engage with customers throughout their life cycles, from customer onboarding to customer billing. While the solution still leverages partner technologies, limiting Wipro’s share of the customer’s wallet, TBR believed this approach was a step in the right direction, with the potential for Wipro to increase the applicability of its to new entities — in this case, telcos — undergoing digital transformation initiatives. Further, an updated alliance with Oracle will also provide case studies for Wipro’s sales teams to aid in direct-sales efforts of Wipro emerging solutions, like DXP, which will be critical to the company’s ability to reduce its reliance on partner-led engagements and increase awareness of the company’s offerings among prospective customers seeking digital solutions and services.

One year on, TBR maintains its assessment that Wipro has taken the right strategic approach, even as we continue to look for definitive signs this strategy has begun paying off. In the post-COVID-19 environment, partnering will be even more critical and Wipro may have established an important foundation in February 2019 that will prove beneficial in the latter half of 2020.