With the acquisition of Appirio, Wipro expects to stay ahead of the game

MUMBAI: Wipro’s $500 million of cloud services company Appirio was not just to gain access to its cloud-integration business, it was also part of a bet that the IT industry would be disrupted the way cab-hailing company Uber disrupted the transport sector. Buried inside Appirio is a crowdsourcing platform for developers and data scientists called TopCoder. Clients contact the platform with their IT requirements and with a budget.

The project is then broken down into different parts that need to implemented. Then competitions are where experts in different fields do the actual work, experienced topcoders act as reviewers and then the developers on the platform are paid for the code. When Appirio bought TopCoder in September 2013, it counted NASA, Harvard University, and cable giant Comcast as customers. Appirio uses the TopCoder platform to some services to its customers. In 2016, TopCoder had over 1million IT professionals -- from coders to data scientists -- on the platform.

“We believe that the future of work in the IT industry is going to get Uberized to some extent. I could have a Wipro-ite who works 9 hours and makes another 4-5 hours of available time to IT work on Topcoder. So then they can submit that work and get paid for that. This is going to be the future of IT in some cases,” Abidali Neemuchwala, CEO of Wipro, told ET.

This has, in fact, already started happening. Last year, in an interview with ET, Appirio CEO Chris Barbin said that out of the nearly 1 million coders on the platform, over 200,000 were from India. ET also reported that IT companies said they were aware that their employees were moonlighting on the site, but had few ways of combating it. So, it is not conceivable that in the future, Wipro could tap a full-time TCS employee on TopCoder to do project work for it. At the start of the year, Wipro started a Top Gear programme -- creating an internal crowdsourcing platform that was meant to tap its bench to work on projects. CEO Abidali Neemuchwala said TopCoder, together with Top Gear, would be part of office of its Chief Technology Officer KR Sanjiv.

Neemuchwala said the TopCoder acquisition would help the company accelerate its Top Gear initiative by two years. “In Top Gear, we went in about two quarters to 22,000 Wiproites. TopCoder already has a million members outside of Wipro. So this accelerates us and enables us to deliver work as it will be done in the future,” Neemuchwala said.

Wipro is not the only IT company to look at tapping crowdsourcing. It is, however, the first Indian IT company to make an acquisition that makes it a player in this space. In September, Accenture Ventures made a minority investments in Applause, which provides crowdsourced testing services. Accenture said the alliance would help its clients build a ‘liquid workforce.’ “Crowdsourcing will supplement, not replace, traditional staffing capabilities and provide flexible access to in-demand talent that can help clients improve the end-toend performance of their websites mobile applications and Internet of Things devices,” Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive at Accenture Technology Services, said in September on the alliance.