Azim Premji on Technology Pivot

His father had incorporated Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd in 1945 at Amalner, in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district, manufacturing Sunflower Vanaspati cooking oil and a laundry soap called 787 that was a byproduct of the oil trade. That single-product, small-town family company would, over five decades, become the global IT services firm Wipro.

In the 1980s, after IBM was expelled from India, Premji changed the company name to Wipro and entered high technology by manufacturing minicomputers through a technology tie-up with the American Sentinel Computer Corporation. From there he made a deliberate pivot from soaps to software, eventually turning Wipro into one of India's flagship IT services exporters.

Premji was introduced as the leader who transformed Wipro from a family-run vegetable oil business (Western India Vegetable Products Ltd) into one of the world's largest outsourcing companies over a roughly forty-year arc. The shorthand used in the West — from Crisco to computers — captured the sheer scale of the diversification in a single phrase.

In his argument, every market at every juncture has significant scale advantages that make incumbents look invincible, yet upstart technologies repeatedly disrupt them and rewrite the rules. He cited Skype, which became the first to offer voice-over-Internet phone services at broad scale, long after established telecom companies had begun talking about the technology — a reminder that incumbents often describe change before they execute it.

He positioned Wipro's gradual evolution as a sequence of pivots rather than one grand one. The 1970s exit of IBM from India opened room for local computer manufacturing; Wipro began assembling its own machines, then moved into computer and IT services for global firms operating in India, and as computers commoditised, shifted toward servers and R&D labs for hire to Western tech and consumer firms.