Wipro Limited is an Indian multinational information technology (IT) consulting and outsourcing service company located in Bangalore, Karnataka in India. The company was incorporated on December 29, 1945, in Mumbai by Mohamed Hasham Premji as Western India Vegetables Products Limited, later abbreviated to Wipro. It was initially set up as a manufacturer of vegetable ghee, vanaspati, and refined oils in Amalner, Maharashtra. True to its origins, the company logo still contains a sunflower. Wipro Limited is a global provider of comprehensive IT solutions and services, including Systems Integration, Consulting, Information Systems outsourcing, IT-enabled services, and R&D services. It is also a value added reseller of desktops, servers, notebooks, storage products, networking solutions and packaged software for international brands.
Wipro now has over 140,000 employees and clients across 54 countries today. The business model at Wipro Technologies Ltd is an industry aligned customer facing model which gives greater understanding of customers’ businesses to build industry specific solutions.
Stated Values of the Organisation
In the mid-1970s, Premji decided to formalise the company’s belief system. Wipro was still a tiny company, with 450 laborers and 75 white-collar staff at the factory, and a skeleton crew of 12 people, including Premji, at the headquarters in Bombay. But Premji had begun hiring formally trained managers out of the Indian Institute of Management, and as he began to diversify into new markets, he was hiring people from other companies. “We said we must be sure we stand for something as a company. We must be sure we know what we are looking for when we hire,” he recalls. The company examined the ethics and values statements of high-profile companies worldwide and talked to business ethicists in academia. Group discussions were held within the company, drawing in not just managers but rank-and-file employees. “We asked, ‘What do