Azim Premji

Bengaluru:(IANS) India’s third largest IT bellwether Wipro on Wednesday admitted strong competition around large deals and pressure on pricing for the new deals.

“Even in a stable demand environment, we see strong competition around large deals and pressure on pricing for new deals, which are getting smaller as multi-hundred million dollar deals have reduced in the marketplace,” Wipro chief executive officer T.K. Kurien told reporters here.

Steep fall in global commodity prices, including crude oil, impacted the software major’s business in energy, natural resources and utilities verticals and resulted in flat growth during the second quarter (July-Sept) of fiscal 2015-16.

“With customers focusing on cost take-outs and consolidation, we are building on our market leadership,” Kurien noted.

The company hopes for a competitive edge in bidding for large deals as return on investments in cognitive intelligence platform (Holmes) and next-generation delivery programme.

“In the digital space, we believe we have an edge in winning deals as we are investing heavily in offering end-to-end design and engineering services,” Kurien pointed out.

Though the outsourcing major has projected higher revenue for third quarter (Oct-Dec) of 2015-16 fiscal, it is likely to be impacted by longer holidays, lesser working days and slower ramp-up of the closed deals.

The company has initiated a programme to train about 10,000 techies in digital technologies during this fiscal.

As digital business gains traction, the company hopes for a greater impact through reshaping of the form and scale of its customer engagements.

“Given the speed of innovation and emergence of new business models, market leadership requires us to work with an ecosystem of customers, partners and start-ups,” Kurien added.