Wipro Technologies has beaten market expectations in the first quarter of FY11, led by

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a volume growth of 4.7 per cent. Suresh Vaswani, joint CEO of the company, spoke to Thanuja B M about the coming quarter, worries from Europe and the company’s brand strategy. Excerpts:

In your words, Q1 has been rock solid and volume led. How's the funnel for the future?

We are seeing a good pipeline broadly in all verticals and geographies. Retail/CPG, BFSI, manufacturing, communication & media sectors look strong in terms of potential. We will continue to invest heavily in healthcare in the next couple of years. We are also looking at consulting, upstream and smart grid & sustainability investments and opportunities in energy and utilities vertical.

What about large deals?

The special team headed by Ramakant Desai is looking at deals more than $100 million. That pipeline looks good and continues to build up.

From order book perspective, we are not just eyeing deals which are ‘keeping the lights on’ type or system integration, but more transformational and creation kind of contracts. (In Q1, Wipro won seven large deals worth $390 million).

A major part of our large deals are from India and West Asia, mainly in telecom, government, BFSI and energy & utilities. We expect a similar kind of growth from this geography.

Is Europe still a concern? What are your plans in this region?

Despite the crisis, there has not been any impact on demand and there is a fairly healthy and complex funnel for comprehensive outsourcing contracts.

We have made specific investments in Germany and France to build delivery centers. We have local people with us and have invested from HR and legal perspective. Wipro now has muscle power here and I think the region will perform for us.

Wipro signed a deal with Magyar Telecom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom and will set up an operations centre in Budapest, Hungary.

We also acquired a data centre in Meerbusch, Germany, from Citibank in an acquisition-cum-deal, which will give us our first data centre presence in Europe and the capability to bid for larger infrastructure deals in the geography.

What about acquisitions? Any change in strategy?

We are now looking at a ‘string of small pearls’ and a ‘string of big pearls’. Small will be companies with innovative and unique technology capability and big firms will be Infocrossing type which can add to our value proposition.

We are also looking at joint ventures like the ones we have with DIAL and Lavasa as well as partnering type of acquisitions like the Citibank deal.

We have identified six themes across service lines - cloud, sustainability, mobility, collaboration, information management and social computing and the acquisition pipeline is good. However, there is no timeline for this.

WCCL’s Vineet Agrawal has been made in charge of branding for the company. Will the company do anything differently?

In the medium and long term, we are relooking at all strategic areas. Branding is one of them. We have aspirations and are studying what the brand value is at present, what customers understand of the brand, does our brand communicate what is intended, etc.

We are now doing a lot of SI/transformational deals, which include innovation. This is creation instead of just lights on kind of work. The brand has to bring out the higher value addition.