The New Face of Global Competition

There are certain moments when you can see the future with such clarity it nearly takes your breath away. I went to India and witnessed the future. I am certain of this, because I saw the explosions. I arrived in Bangalore at the start of the Hindu festival of Diwali. Diwali is a four-day-long celebration of wealth and prosperity, of light over darkness. Strings of colored lights festoon every window; even the meanest shanty blazes with candles. In Bangalore, a city of 6 million, children scamper through the alleyways with sparklers. Fireworks burst randomly from tens of thousands of rooftops.

A thousand points of light? Try a billion. India is a nation of 1 billion people, and, despite enormous challenges, it is on the verge of something spectacular. Out of its poverty and chaotic decrepitude erupt a host of small explosions. It is a place crackling with talent and ideas and ambition. It is where a visitor confronts head-on the new face of a global marketplace -- and the emergence of a new force in high-tech competition.

Near the center of this phenomenon is a company called Wipro Ltd. On a rooftop at Wipro's Electronic City campus one evening, I joined a few dozen engineers at their team Diwali party. It was like a Silicon Valley beer blast without the beer: Laughing employees played movie charades while a portable CD player pumped out tunes. Diwali traditionally is observed at home with family and close friends, but it's not a holiday that's recognized in America -- and these engineers were doing important work for a big American customer. So as the sun faded, they dispersed to their cubicles downstairs and got back to business.

They were toiling on a project for CNA Life, a company 11 and a half time zones away in Nashville, Tennessee. Wipro engineers have been helping CNA reengineer its business processes and improve automated-underwriting performance. This hasn't just involved stringing COBOL code together. Wipro employees have set the strategy, then designed and architected the system. It's high-level stuff, a "mission critical" application.

More explosions: From Wipro's rooftop, you can see a string of holes blown out of farmland nearby. Wipro is excavating the foundation for an 8-acre third phase of its Electronic City facility, the largest of its 10 sites around Bangalore. By 2004, it expects to triple the size of this campus; 17,000 engineers will take on projects for such clients as the Home Depot, Nokia, and Sony.

A decade ago, Wipro was an anonymous conglomerate selling cooking oil and personal computers, mostly in India. Today, it is a $903 million-a-year global company, and most of its business comes from information-technology services. Since 1997, Wipro's revenue has grown by an average of 26% a year while profits have grown by 69%. Its 15,000 technologists write software, integrate back-office solutions, design semiconductors, debug applications, take orders, and field help calls for some of the biggest companies in the world. They are as good at doing all of that as anyone in the world. Perhaps better. And they are cheaper -- on average about 40% cheaper -- than comparable American companies.

It is an irresistible force, and it's on the rise. Three years ago, Bangalore was the software world's biggest body shop, offering coders at $2 an hour. Now Wipro and a few rivals are moving upstream, swinging into such high-value services as consulting, integration, and architecture. Increasingly, Wipro is competing with Accenture, EDS, IBM, and the big accounting firms. And as often as not, it's winning.

Where you stand on all of this, of course, depends on where you sit. Here in Bangalore, Wipro's growth is a matter of tremendous national significance, requital for its loss of high-tech manufacturing and a sign of even bigger things to come. In America, where technology-services companies struggle with weak stock prices and uncertain growth prospects, the rise of a tough, lower-cost competitor is a sensitive subject. That's true even for Wipro's satisfied customers, most of whom declined to speak on the record. (How many American executives want to crow about all of the work they're shipping to India?)

The emergence of Wipro is inspiring and disorienting, a case study in strategic possibility -- and a warning of business dislocation to come. So it is with the unforgiving logic of global competition.

The Rank and File: Big Brains, Bargain Prices

If you are an American technology-strategy consultant making $150,000 a year, you should know about Ganesh Narasimhaiya. Ganesh (mercifully, his business card reads simply Ganesh N.) is a friendly fellow. He is 30 years old. He enjoys cricket, R&B music, and bowling, and he lives with his parents in Bangalore. He earned a bachelor's degree in electronics and communications, and he can spin out code in a variety of languages: COBOL, Java, UML (Unified Modeling Language), among others.