After Infosys, now Wipro hires a Capgemini top executive as CEO & MD

Appoints French IT services firm's COO Thierry Delaporte for its top post.

With Wipro announcing to appoint Thierry Delaporte for its top post, two of the leading Bengaluru-headquartered companies will now have CEOs & MDs who were previously working with French IT services major Capgemini in leadership roles. Salil Parekh, who is presently the CEO & MD at Infosys was a member of the Group Executive Board ay Capgemini looking after the company’s UK, Asia Pacific and financial services business before joining the Bengaluru firm in January 2018.

Wipro on Friday announced that Delaporte who is Capgemini’s chief operating officer and also a member of the group executive board, would join the company as its CEO & MD, effective July 6, 2020. A French national, he would be based out of Paris. Wipro also said that since Neemuchwala would leave the company from June 1, its chairman Rishad Premji would oversee the daily operations of the firm during this interim period.

During his twenty-five year career with Capgemini, Delaporte held several leadership roles including that of chief executive officer of the global financial services strategic business unit, and head of all global service lines. His experience in overseeing Capgemini’s India operations- one of the largest delivery centres of the company- is likely to put him in good stead in managing the operations of Wipro. He has a bachelor’s degree in economy and finance from Sciences Po Paris and a Masters in Law from Sorbonne University.

“I am delighted to welcome Thierry as CEO and Managing Director of the company. Thierry has an exceptional leadership track record, strong international exposure, deep strategic expertise, a unique ability to forge long-standing client relationships, and proven experience of driving transformation and managing technological disruption. We believe that Thierry is the right person to lead Wipro in its next phase of growth,” said Rishad Premji, Chairman at Wipro Ltd. “I want to thank Abid for all that he has done for Wipro and for making this transition as smooth and seamless as possible despite his personal commitments.”

Coronavirus: India Inc steps up act to contain crisis as tally reaches 29

Across the country, companies have stepped up their act to contain the crisis. IT and other new economy firms seem to have taken a lead.

Mindspace IT Park, Hyderabad’s largest office hub spread over several acres, was a centre of panic on Wednesday as a techie tested positive for coronavirus. The complex, housing many marquee brands, caught on to the news in no time, prompting employers to send their staff home.

An employee of Dutch company DSM Shared Services, the software professional had recently returned from an assignment in Italy. Hers was the second confirmed case of the virus in Telangana. “Our thoughts are with our colleague, who is doing relatively well and is being treated in quarantine,” the company said in an internal e-mail.

More than 1,000 km away, in Gurugram, next to New Delhi, another person tested positive, this time in the Paytm office, taking India’s tally to 29. He too had returned from a vacation in Italy. The company has asked its staff to work from home for a couple of days while the office gets sanitised.

Across the country, India Inc has stepped up its act to contain the crisis. IT and new-economy companies seem to have taken a lead.

At the Manyata Tech Park in Bengaluru, a US-headquartered software product company advised its employees to work from home till Friday, after an associate who had travelled from an affected country showed flu-like symptoms. Even though the person was declared asymptomatic by medical experts, the company began disinfecting the campus as a precautionary measure.

While online major Amazon confirmed its first case of coronavirus in its Seattle office, the company’s India unit felt the ripple effect. Amazon India has imposed travel restrictions, advising employees to prioritise health over efficiency. According to the advisory, all domestic travels by the employees can be undertaken only after consulting the manager while approval from vice-president is required for international travels.

Walmart–owned e-commerce firm Flipkart too has imposed a complete ban on all business travels, both domestic and international. In case the travel is unavoidable, CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy must give an approval.

Users' privacy at risk? Facebook 'labels' posts manually in India

Human-powered content labeling, also referred to as 'data annotation,' is a growth industry as companies seek to harness data for AI training and other purposes.

Business Standard : Over the past year, a team of as many as 260 contract workers in Hyderabad, India has ploughed through millions of Facebook Inc photos, status updates and other content posted since 2014.

The workers categorize items according to five "dimensions," as Facebook calls them.

These include the subject of the post - is it food, for example, or a selfie or an animal? What is the occasion - an everyday activity or major life event? And what is the author's intention - to plan an event, to inspire, to make a joke?

The work is aimed at understanding how the types of things users post on its services are changing, Facebook said. That can help the company develop new features, potentially increasing usage and ad revenue.

Details of the effort were provided by multiple employees at outsourcing firm Wipro Ltd over several months. The workers spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation by the Indian firm. Facebook later confirmed many details of the project. Wipro declined to comment and referred all questions to Facebook.

The Wipro work is among about 200 content labeling projects that Facebook has at any time, employing thousands of people globally, company officials told Reuters.

Many projects are aimed at "training" the software that determines what appears in users' news feeds and powers the artificial intelligence underlying many other features.

The labeling efforts have not previously been reported.

"It's a core part of what you need," said Nipun Mathur, the director of product management for AI at Facebook. "I don't see the need going away."

The content labeling program could raise new privacy issues for Facebook, according to legal experts consulted by Reuters. The company is facing regulatory investigations worldwide over an unrelated set of alleged privacy abuses involving the sharing of user data with business partners.

The Wipro workers said they gain a window into lives as they view a vacation photo or a post memorializing a deceased family member. Facebook acknowledged that some posts, including screenshots and those with comments, may include user names.

Wipro boosts local hiring to ramp up delivery in onshore locations

IT firm pursues localisation drive in US, Europe and Australia, also doubles campus hiring in India this year with demand uptick.

With adoption of protectionist policies by governments across the world, a lot of human resource related actions of Wipro are now shifting to onsite locations including the US, Europe and Australia. The IT services firm is replicating a model similar to that of India, which it has been following for quite long, to ramp up delivery presence and hire more locals as part of its workforce in client geographies.

(Business Standard)

"We are doing absolutely the same thing in the US and other markets, that we used to do here (in India). We are hiring graduates from campuses, training them before putting in projects," said Saurabh Govil, president and chief human resource officer at Wipro.

This is reflecting in its localisation drive, especially in the US which is by far the largest market for Indian IT services companies including Wipro. Close to 63 per cent of Wipro’s workforce in the US now constitute of local American employees as compared to 30 per cent, three years ago. Even though Wipro does not share its US employee number, experts estimate the number at around 14,000.

"We are doing big time localisation in the US," said Govil. “We now have new delivery centres in Dallas, East Coast, West Coast and Mid-West. The model is to get an anchor customer and grow a development centre around that.” Apart from the US, the IT firm is also following the same approach in the UK and Australia.

While the company is hiring more locals in onshore locations, it is taking a careful approach in maintaining bench strength (number of reserve employees who are not deployed in any client project). To serve its clients in North America and Europe region, Wipro is taking the help of nearshore delivery centres in Mexico, Brazil, Romania and Ireland among others.

With demand uptick, Wipro has also hired more employees in India after hitting slow lane in last two years. In 2018, the IT firm had doubled its campus hires as compared to previous year.

While in September quarter, the company had added 10,687 employees; its net addition in December quarter stood at 928. "In last quarter, hiring was slow due to lot of holidays, furloughs and client shutdowns. Otherwise, it remained robust. We had doubled our hiring from campuses this year as compared to last year," Govil said.

However, the company indicated that employee addition would moderate in coming quarters for the industry with the shift in revenue flows. "While there is a lot of hiring for the right skillsets, we are also seeing a lot of growth coming now from non-linear ways including platforms, IPs and consultancy areas. That's a shift, which is happening," the Chief HRO of Wipro said.