Bangalore's Big Dreams
India's major outsourcers now offer complex tech services, like design engineering
BANGALORE, INDIA--Kaushik Mukherjee's workshop looks like a place where electronics go to die. The guts of tech gear lie exposed, their circuit boards tethered to computer monitors like patients on life support. But the reality is quite different. Mukherjee and his colleagues are hard at work on the next wave of consumer electronics. In one area, they are doctoring a low-cost computer chip to mimic a pricey one for a sub-$50 satellite TV digital video recorder. Nearby, they are designing circuitry for a 65-inch high-definition television. There are other projects, too, ones they can't talk about for competitive reasons.
The name of Mukherjee's employer, Indian tech giant Wipro Ltd., won't appear on any of the eventual products being developed for corporate clients with familiar names. Italian automaker Fiat, for instance, had Wipro design the satellite navigation system for its Alfa Romeo cars. Nokia, the big cellphone maker, sends work to Wipro's engineers. In general, though, anonymity is the rule when it comes to product design outsourcing, as the corporate culture here embraces the idea of packaging a "Wipro brain" under someone else's brand. "We're not a product company," says Mukherjee. "We're a services company."
If you think tech outsourcing is limited to call centers, software writing, and back-office operations, think again. The same Indian firms that generated the outsourcing wave--and the ensuing jobs controversy--are moving up what one executive calls the "value chain." The big three--Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, and Wipro--and myriad smaller firms are taking outsourcing in new directions, tech product research and development being just one example. Since the trend is not as obvious as when it involves hearing an Indian-accented voice on a customer help line, it might be considered, as Wipro notes, a "silent revolution."
Two worlds. The heart of the revolution is in Bangalore, a burgeoning city of 6 million that is India's high-tech capital. The streets are rutted and crumbling, the traffic is chaotic, and people complain about electric blackouts, garbage piles, and other typical Third World afflictions. But pass through the gate at any of the city's major outsourcing campuses, and suddenly you could be in Silicon Valley, with the same modern architecture and landscaping, air-conditioned offices, and cappuccino-serving food courts. There are sophisticated videoconferencing facilities, swimming pools, tennis courts, and, perhaps most striking, green lawns in contrast to the brown arid land just beyond the walls. Employees exist in a kind of virtual reality where the normal constraints of the physical world--location, distance, even time--can seem irrelevant. Wipro computer systems experts in one control room here, for instance, manage the minute-by-minute operations of a client's complex network that is physically located a continent away in Britain.
Just as companies sought substantial savings by farming out call centers, they are now attracted by the potential to outsource engineering design and sophisticated business computing. On any given day at Wipro and Infosys, welcome signs for visiting clients read like a list of America's best-known corporations. The firms ask that names not be cited, but Wipro's public client list includes Morgan Stanley, Sun Microsystems, General Motors, Honeywell, Cisco, and Lucent. With some 400 corporate clients, Wipro's head count has tripled since 2002 to nearly 42,000. The company is hiring at a rate of three people every working hour--choosing less than 1 in 100 applicants.
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