Wipro ropes in TCS’ Dave Chopra as VP of global infrastructure business

BENGALURU: Months after it poached Tata Consultancy Services veteran Abid Ali Neemuchwala as its operations chief, Wipro has roped in yet another top executive from TCS, Dave Chopra as Vice President of its key global infrastructure business. India's third-largest software exporter confirmed the development.

"Wipro can confirm that Dave Chopra has joined the company as vice-president, global infrastructure services, and will be responsible for driving strategy, marketing and business development for GIS. He will report to GK Prasanna, chief executive & president, global infrastructure services, Wipro," a Wipro spokesperson said in an email response to ET.

Infrastructure services business contributes nearly $2 billion, or about Rs 13,200 crore, of annual revenues to the Bengaluru-based IT major.

Chopra previously served as global head of strategy for infrastructure services at TCS and spent nearly 15 years at the country's top software exporter. According to his LinkedIn profile, he joined Wipro in August and is based out of New York. He joins Wipro at a time when big outsourcing firms are fighting for a bigger share of the fast-growing infrastructure management services market.

According to a report by outsourcing advisory ISG, at least $250 billion, or about .`16,50,000 crore, worth of deals are coming up for renewal in the next three years, with a significant chunk of it being driven by infrastructure services.

Since Neemuchwala, former head of TCS' business process outsourcing division, came on board as president and COO in April, Wipro has poached some senior executives of the Tata group firm. The list includes Ankur Prakash, who heads emerging markets business of Wipro, and David D'Lima, head of its newly-created integrated services and solutions group — an initiative being personally driven by Neemuchwala. Neemuchwala, widely seen as a future CEO at Wipro, is trying to replicate a strategy of bundling together services and solutions that multinational rivals such as IBM have adopted for years to serve top clients.

In an interview to ET last month Neemuchwala said, "(One of the changes) that I've brought about is creating an integrated services and solutions group with a team of experts. Historically, Wipro has always been a very strong engineering organisation and that has always worked well for us. Now the future of the industry is about going to the customer and solving the customer's problems. If it takes five of your offerings or service lines or practices to come together to do it, you need to do it internally, in the back office."

Over the past five years, Wipro has lagged peers such as TCS, Infosys and US-based Cognizant Technology Services, and struggled to maintain consistency in its performance, triggering many overhauls and reshuffles inside the company.

To be sure, Wipro has become a much leaner organisation under CEO TK Kurien, who has handed more decision making powers to his key lieutenants and aggressively pushed for automation to improve margins and created a simpler organisational structure, in the process. However, Wipro is still struggling to catch up with larger rivals in key verticals such as banking and financial services.

Since Neemuchwala took over the day-to-day operations from Kurien, he has been driving a number of changes through the organisation as part of an effort to strengthen Wipro's operating core and simplify its organisational structure. To execute this strategy, he is turning to some of his former colleagues from TCS and putting together a team that can deliver results fast.