Ramesh Emani, president of Wipro Technologies' Product Engineering Services business unit in Bangalore, has seen India become an information technology powerhouse in nearly two decades at Wipro. Now the country is moving up the value chain toward research and development services to create new products that will be launched globally. Although it's early in the race, Emani and Wipro Technologies, a unit of Wipro, one of India's top IT services companies, are likely to play a big role as global companies move R&D to India. Knowledge@Wharton spoke with Emani about trends in R&D, competition from China and the management of offshore research facilities.
Knowledge@Wharton: You work across a lot of different domains -- automobiles, consumer electronics, telecom, medical devices, and so on. Within this wide range, what would you regard as Wipro's most significant R&D projects in the recent past?
Emani: In the telecom industry, we have been working in two areas. One is in the field of training with large product portfolios for our customers. Because our customers are able to transfer the engineering to us, we feel they are able to keep their products alive. Otherwise, they may have not been able to maintain or run these products profitably given the price erosion and other challenges to their costs. The second category is developing new concepts such as the whole new voice over IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure and software as well as new DSL (digital subscriber line) products. We're also working with many semiconductor companies.
Knowledge@Wharton: Wipro did a survey in March about the global sourcing of R&D which found that 13% of the respondents were extremely satisfied and getting more value than expected. That's exactly the same percentage as those who thought it was extremely disappointing. Could you comment on what's going on and the challenges you encounter?
Emani: First, let me make a general comment on outsourcing.
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