Azim Premji: DQ IT Man of The Year 1999

Long
before the family-controlled business opened up to professional
advice, a 21-year-old drop-out from the Stanford University, took
over a fledgling cooking oil company after the untimely demise of
his father. And with him came professional managers in the business.
From a Rs 7 crore cooking oil company in 1966, Wipro today is a
Rs 2,000 crore giant, which commands a market capitalization of
over Rs 20,000 crore. Meet DATAQUEST IT Man of the Year 1999–54-year-old
Azim Hasham Premji, Chairman, Wipro Corp.

From
a cooking oil company  to an IT giant, it has been  a
long way on divergent roads for Premji. He is an entrepreneur who
is in the area of technology. As Premji said in the course of a
lecture, “I am not a technologist, but an entrepreneur in the area
of technology. As an entrepreneur, however, I have had a ring side
view of the vast, exciting changes that have swept across the face
of information technology.” He may not be a technologist or a technocrat
per se, but Premji is a strategist and one of the best businessmen
that India has seen. He is a person who lends his vision and strategies
to not just one line of business, but to multiple lines. And this
is what has made him what he is today. Today, Wipro and Azim Premji
are synonyms and role models for the new generation entrepreneurs.
Not as the maverick family-controlled businessman, but as the strategist
and the copybook entrepreneur who never took defeat in his stride.

Premji  began his career by taking
over Western India Vegetable Products after the death of his father.
He was a few months shy of his bachelor’s degree in engineering
at Stanford. He might have stayed on in the US, hoping to land a
job in the World Bank. But destiny didn’t allow him that and he
plunged head-on into a business of which he had no knowledge–the
cooking oil trade. He defied all business logic at that time and
instead of wooing and cajoling the bureaucrats who controlled industrial
production, Premji decided to focus on consumers eliminating middlemen.
“In the last 52 years, we have built a very successful corporation.
However, people and organizations live for the future. We believe
that it is the customer who really has the choice to grant us the
future,” says Premji, speaking about the way Wipro has grown to
be what it is today.

His philosophy for the future is very
clear. Integrity and the customer are of paramount importance and
will continue to remain so. “In the future, what will remain unchanged
is the need of the customer for an organization with a human face.
An organization that offers a variety of expert, innovative and
value-for-money products and services that touch the essential to
intelligent aspects of human life. An organization that delivers
these values on a strong foundation of integrity,” he says. And
this is what has driven the company towards its goal–applying thought,
day after day.

Premji, like many industrialists of
his time, did venture into different lines of business–from soaps
to hydraulic fluid, lighting, baby powder and finance. During the
late seventies, at a time when multinational companies like IBM
were leaving India, Premji,  true to his style, did not think
twice before jumping on to the IT bandwagon. Today, he is the richest
Indian. And he took a route which others dreaded–to get into branded
software products. He burnt his fingers in the process and it took
him nearly a decade to get into what is today considered the bedrock
of his and the company's earnings–software services. But it was
the consumer care business that gave him financial strength and
facilitated further diversification of the company into IT and healthcare
technology services. “The consistent excellent profitability of
the consumer care business enabled the company to invest in new
businesses,” says Premji.

More
about Premji