Wipro plans open source team of 10,000

Wipro is investing heavily in open source technologies and intends to scale up to 10,000 people in this space. Open source reduces dependency on expensive proprietary software and the company believes open source has the opportunity to reduce IT deployment costs very significantly.

Wipro CEO TK Kurien said a complete data centre stack can be built with open source at 50% of the cost of traditional methods. "We believe this has the potential for really disintermediating the IT expenditure incurred in the past. We have built a practice in infrastructure and applications around open source and see quite a few deployments happening," he said.

India's third-largest IT services company recently hired Andrew Aitken to head the global open source practice. Aitken previously founded consulting firm Olliance Consulting Group.

Wipro's open source practice will offer consulting services, roadmap development, integration, legacy migration, risk mitigation and support. On the applications side, the company is looking at open source platforms and solutions like Alfresco, Drupal, BonitaSoft and Magento. On the database side, it's looking at some popular ones like Hadoop, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

Open source was critical to the success of the internet where original source code was made freely available to be modified. Aitken said customers are demanding support for their open source initiatives and that those initiatives fall into two categories. "One is legacy migration from traditional proprietary software to open source. The other is more innovative solutions like cloud computing and big data analytics.With any technology shift, there could be upfront costs associated. But the more you use open source, the more clear the financial benefits become," he said.

Dave Gardner, founder of US-based Gardner & Associates Consulting, said clients were drawn to open source technologies as they were tired of being held hostage by proprietary software vendors when they offer no or limited advantage over their open source equivalent technologies.

Wipro is setting up innovation labs and leveraging on its existing ones to showcase open source solutions at scale. "We are making investments to build a world class advisory team and then into consulting and architecture and getting into our complete ecosystem within Wipro and positioning that as integrated offerings to our end customers," said Krishnakumar N Menon, VP of business application solutions & open source initiative in Wipro.