Wipro plans to increase outsourcing spend by BP & GE to catch up with TCS & Infosys

BANGALORE: Wipro plans to increase its share of outsourcing spend by top customers BP plc and GE, as India's third biggest software exporter seeks to catch up with bigger rivals TCS and Infosys who have more clients contributing over $100 million in annual revenues.

With only three customers contributing $100 million or more, Wipro needs to gain a larger share of spend from top customers. Infosys has 11 customers contributing $100 million or above in yearly revenues, while TCS has eight such lar GE clients. Wipro gets 20% of its revenues from the top ten customers, lower than TCS' 30% and Infosys' 25%.

On its part, Wipro has already started tapping into outsourcing spend by customers such as BP, especially after it acquired SAIC's IT arm.

Wipro's efforts in setting this metric right have started showing. In the January-March 2011 period, the company increased its $100 million clients to three from just one. The company also derived annualised revenue in excess of $50 million from 22 customers in FY11 compared to 16 such customers in FY10.

General Electric, which outsources IT services worth almost $1 billion, is another large client from which Wipro has been increasing revenues. The company got empanelled with GE in 2009 to start bidding for the company's projects again and has grown this to an over $25 million account since then with plans to increase this to well over $50 million.

With the acquisition of SAIC's IT business, Wipro has also been making inroads in BP. Not only has the company acquired SAIC's revenue from BP, it will also be able to sell a greater range of services to the oil major in its upstream business.

"We will also be getting a share of their spends in areas like exploration etc," Anand Padmanabhan, Senior Vice-President, Energy, Natural Resources and Utilities SBU, Wipro Technologies told ET in an interview.