Wipro launched its Wipro FullStride Cloud Services with a commitment of $1 billion in technology, talent, and partnerships over the next three years, but whether it can compete with the top tier of cloud services providers is dependent on executing on their ambitions.

With this commitment, Wipro is giving fresh impetus to its Cloud strategy and scale of talent, aligning its organization and growing partner relationships to compete for leadership in Cloud services. The market leaders have become more aggressive in investing, building, and acquiring talent. With FullStride, Wipro is expressing its commitment to join in the race. 

FullStride is about building talent, execution, and M&A at Wipro around Cloud

Wipro FullStride Cloud Services will invest in aligning talent, process, and digital expertise to offer a compelling reason to consider the vendor for the next wave of digital transformation and cloud-based data and application modernization efforts and enterprise transformation. Wipro FullStride Cloud Services investments are for:

1. Expanding hyperscaler and strategic partner relationships,
2. Deepening advisory and consulting expertise,
3. Expanding execution capabilities and hiring and training existing Wipro employees,
4. Developing new verticalized solutions in-house and with partners, and 
5. Acquiring regional and technical firms to boost advisory, cloud security, application and data modernization, and orchestration efforts.

Investing $1B becomes one of three providers formally announcing billiondollar cloud investments; and given the global war for Cloud talent by services providers and enterprises, this may be the requirement to stay a leader in the market. To put Wipro’s investment in context, in 2021, Wipro reported revenues of $8.46B, and a $1B investment over three years is roughly 3.5% to 4% of their revenues per year. While considerable, with the hyper growth of enterprise to Cloud transitions, Wipro may need to invest even more in the coming years. 

Wipro will need to work hard to align their organization with a compelling vision for Cloud

Change is never easy, but since joining, Thierry Delaporte has prioritized reinvigorating and energizing one of the market’s leading firms. And while there are many aspects of organizational change which he has been addressing, none might be as crucial as setting his company’s Cloud Native North Star. By green lighting a $1 billion investment, he has committed the executive team to a new strategy focused on providing business advisory and consulting services to complement Wipro’s technology services pedigree. 

To be successful, Wipro will have to remain steadfast in this investment that further promises to modernize its business models, talent, and culture. Wipro FullStride Cloud Services’ elements will be critical to fostering new partnerships, offering unique solutions, and building talent around a full stack of industry-focused cloud native capabilities. Putting a cash number on the investment is a good start. Still, Thierry’s team now begins the more audacious task of leading the necessary cultural change within the new organizational model they’ve embraced.

Wipro FullStride Cloud Services must go beyond technical cloud solutions and bring sustainable business value to succeed

The pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption for every enterprise and employee, requiring technology teams and partners to innovate at a breakneck pace. Previously, strong partnerships with services providers defined how well each party knew one another’s strengths and trust that they could distill the must-have capabilities needed to drive customer value at speed and scale. CIOs learned quickly that slow and steady would not win the race. 

The greatest challenge for Wipro will be managing the internal organizational changes while also focusing on bringing to market products and services to reduce the complexity for their clients’ cloud journeys. With 1 in 4 firms still struggling with their own Cloud Strategy, Wipro is investing in the right time with these efforts to build talent, partnerships, and vertical expertise to help drive business outcomes delivered by technology. By showing commitment to building Cloud talent, establishing new partnerships, and acquiring to fill gaps, its clients expect to see a more aggressive partner to aid their transformation efforts. 

With Wipro FullStride Cloud Services, Wipro steps up to meet the investments being made over the past 12 months by Accenture ($3B Cloud First), Infosys (Cobalt (amount not disclosed)), and Atos OneCloud ($2.3B). This investment solidifies Wipro’s commitment to build customer-centric solutions based on cloud architectures and to aid customers in developing solutions that will evolve legacy IT and business processes. In addition, other leaders in this space, TCS, Cognizant, and EY, have also made some compelling moves partnering and acquiring businesses to add to their Cloud talent and capabilities. 

Wipro’s ability to translate its domain expertise, technical acumen, and robust partner ecosystem gives it the knowhow to compete but be aware that Wipro FullStride Cloud Services will be an internal cultural journey as a capability one for the vendor. 

The Bottom Line: Companies can expect Wipro to bring more cloud-centric talent to win deals for the market 

While it’s not clear how the $1Bn investment will be shared across M&A, talent development, and marketing & products, FullStride should benefit both Wipro’s new IDEAS and iCORE teams. This investment should also offer customers a broader mix of architecture, application, and data modernization options as they seek sustainable, long-term cloud migration programs.