WIPRO: Accelerating the Application Transformation of Enterprises
Every business today is looking to add ‘Smart’ to their applications to create software that is more intelligent, autonomous and contextually aware. Wipro defines these as 'Smart applications' that is shaping the future of applications and re-defining customer and employee expectations. Built with a cloud-first, mobile-first and AI-first approach, these new set of applications can plough through mountains of data and arrive at answers and solutions with a high degree of accuracy and speed. Moreover, with a tremendous amount of resources at their disposal, Smart applications are also able to analyze networks, detect suspicious activity, identify false transactions and detect vulnerabilities and proactively respond and remediate them. However, despite their ability to bring intelligent automation into processes, building these applications is no simple task as it comes with process and technology complexities that entail large budgets, a team of adeptly trained architects, data scientists, and capabilities to access vast amounts of data as well as create sophisticated models and algorithms. Furthermore, even with the present day availability of the Cloud infrastructure, analytics and predictive technologies, and the rapid proliferation of IoT devices, organizations still lose their way in the technological euphoria brought on by the multitude of disruptions. Recognizing these crucial challenges and endeavoring to address them, Wipro combines technology with cultural transformation to employ its DevOps capabilities and create a suite of Smart applications that hinge around the four smart imperatives: smart interactions, smart processes, smart platforms and smart security.As a global IT solutions provider, Wipro,in a period of over seven decades, has been maximizing value for its expansive clientele through integrating deep industry insights and leading technologies with its best in class execution capabilities. With a prominent global presence and over 160,000 employees serving across diverse industries, the company has been working to harness the power of technologies such as Cognitive Computing, Hyper automation, DevOps, Mobility, Robotics, Cloud Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, IoT, and other emerging technologies to help its clients successfully adapt to today’s digital world.
Moreover, among these various innovations, Wipro has dedicated special attention to developing its DevOps capabilities, as the company believes DevOps to be the focal point, around which new disruptions will get delivered. Being well positioned in the DevOps space with its DevOps Maturity Model a transformative approach, the company has grown be a digital transformation partner for a large number of clients. "Traditional and sequential methods of application development have been disrupted by more agile and iterative ways of service delivery today," opines Hiral Chandrana, Senior VP & Global Head - Application Services, Wipro. Leveraging these capabilities, Wipro, over the last few years,has invested significantly in leading DevOps platforms, tools and solutions that can accelerate software deployment timelines with continuous testing, integration and release management. “We believe that DevOps is only the starting point of more disruptions such as DevSecOps and AI Ops services, which will bring in more Security and Automated Responses in Low Code Cloud native environments along with new ways of working in the years to come. In this context, our recent investments in Denim Group is to realize true value of Dev SecOps and Tricentis, to strengthen our capabilities in continuous testing. We are investing heavily in partnering with ventures that add cutting edge, unique capabilities to our DevOps portfolio.” adds Hiral.
Sustainable DevOps Approach
With an objective to bring DevOps capabilities that can meet the needs of the Digital Era, Wipro follows a unique and sustainable approach that combines the organization's expertise and native platforms with its partner ecosystem solutions to bring new ways of working for its clients. As mentioned above, Wipro takes its DevOps Maturity Model, a transformative approach built on the 4Ms defined by the organization i.e.- Method, Model, Machine and Mindset, integrated with the 3 key elements of Strategic Consulting, Talent / People, and IPs/Accelerators to develop and assess its clients’ DevOps journey and enable them to realize agility and reliability. It is well recognized for its Wipro’s Integrated Agile DevOps platform (WID), a modularized platform that works across the application life cycle management framework, to help organizations achieve 80 percent reutilization and 20 percent configuration/customization. As a plug and play solution infused with Wipro HOLMES(TM) (Wipro's AI platform), WID brings analytics and governance capabilities that enable clients to set up orchestration environments, irrespective of the technologies used in their organization. Additionally, Wipro's WID is integrated with ThreadFix platform of Denim Group to derive DevSecOps.
Wipro prioritizes its people aspect or what it terms as the 'mindset' aspect in its 4M approach. In this regard, it realizes value through two of its crowd sourcing platforms - Top Gear, its home-grown platform has
launched DevOps labs which are real-life labs to nurture full stack talent for its clients. The second is their Topcoder - a leader in Crowd Sourcing obtained through Wipro's Appirio acquisition in late 2016, to bring best talent from across the world to deliver more speed and capacity across the value chain. "True scale is possible in any DevOps operation only when enterprises embrace new ways of working, and hence Wipro is driving a company wide re-skilling, crowd sourcing and competency transformation to stay ahead in the digital world," explains Hiral.
Leveraging DevOps to Support Smart applications
While Smart applications can bring together multiple technology innovations and inject highly personalized user experiences, intelligence and automation into every aspect of the business, the implementation of these apps is accompanied by challenges of monitoring as well as concerns of continuous integration and deployment, given the variety of environments and the differences among them. This is especially common from a security assurance stand point where the ownership is now fully or partially moving from CISOs to application owners. Furthermore, given the close association between the data and logic in Smart applications; actions such as handling of data, training of models, model evaluation, feedback loops, and re-training of models etc. are some of the life cycle activities that prove to be challenging while deploying Smart applications. However, DevOps can perfectly meet this need for new tooling and approaches, owing to its capability to handle the scale of monitoring and operations of Smart applications. With DevOps rapidly evolving and serving as a tool to build smarter applications, Wipro has been focused on leveraging these capabilities to build Smart applications that are more autonomous, intelligent and context-aware. Centered around the four imperatives of Smart Processes, Smart Interactions, Smart Platforms and Smart Security, Wipro’s Smart applications Suite has been designed and deployed for each of these imperatives to create applications that can humanize user interactions, enable business agility through hyper automation and bring transformational business capabilities into the core of the enterprise.
Future Engagements
Having ventured into diverse industry verticals in a period of over seven decades, Wipro has grown to be one of the most distinguished technology establishments today and is widely recognized and commended for its contributions in the IT realm. Leveraging this position, the company aims to employ its DevOps capabilities to build more Smart applications. "True evolution of DevOps has not only just begun, but is progressing rapidly to automate application development and pave way for a new era of Smart applications," concludes Hiral.
Key Initiatives on the DevOps Front
DevSecOps - In the DevOps world, where technology disruptions are tremendous and application changes entail compliance and risk implications, Security is of utmost importance and needs to be ingrained into every Application development process. Recognizing this need, Wipro has recently forged an association with Denim Group, a Texas-based Risk and Security firm, to adopt ThreadFix – the company’s Cyber Security Assurance platform. Through this alliance, Wipro hopes to strengthen its WID platform and its portfolio of Digital Transformation services as well as embed more security into its Agile & DevOps Software Development Methodologies, to better mitigate Cybersecurity risks and protect its future programs where “Digital Trust” would be critical.
People Transformation - Wipro's 'People Transformation' program has been designed with the objective to train its clients as well as its own cadre of DevOps professionals to take on large digital projects. Through its Digital Academy, the company delivers design thinking skills to professionals so as to equip them with a persona-driven and soft skills approach, while also fostering a DevOps mindset. Additionally, Wipro has also designed highly customized gamification workshops that focus on the cultural and change management aspects of IT services implementations, which are known to make or break their success.
As-a-Service & Zero Touch Change (ZTC)– Believing that all capabilities are better offered on an outcome/variable model, such as Experience as a Service and Integration as a Service, Wipro brings its As-a-Service and Zero Touch Change (ZTC) models to drive disruptive value, greater agility and more desirable business outcomes. While this involves “full stack” engineers to think as product owners, Wipro believes that a human user-centric approach is important to DevOps deliveries, in order to enable faster feature development and release times.
Leveraging DevOps to Support Smart applications
While Smart applications can bring together multiple technology innovations and inject highly personalized user experiences, intelligence and automation into every aspect of the business, the implementation of these apps is accompanied by challenges of monitoring as well as concerns of continuous integration and deployment, given the variety of environments and the differences among them. This is especially common from a security assurance stand point where the ownership is now fully or partially moving from CISOs to application owners. Furthermore, given the close association between the data and logic in Smart applications; actions such as handling of data, training of models, model evaluation, feedback loops, and re-training of models etc. are some of the life cycle activities that prove to be challenging while deploying Smart applications. However, DevOps can perfectly meet this need for new tooling and approaches, owing to its capability to handle the scale of monitoring and operations of Smart applications. With DevOps rapidly evolving and serving as a tool to build smarter applications, Wipro has been focused on leveraging these capabilities to build Smart applications that are more autonomous, intelligent and context-aware. Centered around the four imperatives of Smart Processes, Smart Interactions, Smart Platforms and Smart Security, Wipro’s Smart applications Suite has been designed and deployed for each of these imperatives to create applications that can humanize user interactions, enable business agility through hyper automation and bring transformational business capabilities into the core of the enterprise.
Wipro combines technology with cultural transformation to employ its DevOps capabilities and create a suite of Smart applications
Future Engagements
Having ventured into diverse industry verticals in a period of over seven decades, Wipro has grown to be one of the most distinguished technology establishments today and is widely recognized and commended for its contributions in the IT realm. Leveraging this position, the company aims to employ its DevOps capabilities to build more Smart applications. "True evolution of DevOps has not only just begun, but is progressing rapidly to automate application development and pave way for a new era of Smart applications," concludes Hiral.
Key Initiatives on the DevOps Front
DevSecOps - In the DevOps world, where technology disruptions are tremendous and application changes entail compliance and risk implications, Security is of utmost importance and needs to be ingrained into every Application development process. Recognizing this need, Wipro has recently forged an association with Denim Group, a Texas-based Risk and Security firm, to adopt ThreadFix – the company’s Cyber Security Assurance platform. Through this alliance, Wipro hopes to strengthen its WID platform and its portfolio of Digital Transformation services as well as embed more security into its Agile & DevOps Software Development Methodologies, to better mitigate Cybersecurity risks and protect its future programs where “Digital Trust” would be critical.
People Transformation - Wipro's 'People Transformation' program has been designed with the objective to train its clients as well as its own cadre of DevOps professionals to take on large digital projects. Through its Digital Academy, the company delivers design thinking skills to professionals so as to equip them with a persona-driven and soft skills approach, while also fostering a DevOps mindset. Additionally, Wipro has also designed highly customized gamification workshops that focus on the cultural and change management aspects of IT services implementations, which are known to make or break their success.
As-a-Service & Zero Touch Change (ZTC)– Believing that all capabilities are better offered on an outcome/variable model, such as Experience as a Service and Integration as a Service, Wipro brings its As-a-Service and Zero Touch Change (ZTC) models to drive disruptive value, greater agility and more desirable business outcomes. While this involves “full stack” engineers to think as product owners, Wipro believes that a human user-centric approach is important to DevOps deliveries, in order to enable faster feature development and release times.
