Bangalore: Wipro Limited said today (Nov 15, 2004) it has aligned closely with Microsoft Corp to accelerate business, and expects growth from Microsoft-related business to gain momentum.

CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer met Wipro Chairman Azim Premji at Wipro's Headquarters in Bangalore.

According to Wipro, with more than 5,000 employees focused on delivering Microsoft technology solutions to customers, Wipro has established separate practices to support Microsoft .NET and infrastructure related business opportunities in response to customer needs and accelerating business growth.

Within the past five years, Wipro has rapidly expanded its Microsoft related business and expects that growth to gain momentum, the company said in a statement.

Wipro has recently aligned key internal business units to provide a broader range and suite of Microsoft-related consulting services to enterprise customers.

They include platform strategy consulting, product engineering services, application integration and management, IT infrastructure and BPO services, across key verticals that include retail, manufacturing, energy and utilities, healthcare and financial services, Wipro said.

According to Premji, the integrated innovation of the Microsoft platform offers Wipro customers increased business agility while significantly reducing total cost of ownership.

"The Wipro and Microsoft alliance provides us with a significant opportunity to accelerate our business as more and more customers are looking for ways to reduce their IT spend while gaining in the areas of security, application availability and productivity," he said.

Ballmer said Wipro offers deep industry expertise and a rich portfolio of solutions that build on the Microsoft platform to help customers reduce costs and grow their top line.

"We look forward to evolving our relationship with Wipro and helping customers worldwide realise more value from their IT investments," added Ballmer.

Wipro said it has recently collaborated with Microsoft on joint solution development covering seven key focus areas: business process management, retail point of sale, RFID, zero touch deployment, hospital information system and the store manager workbench.

Wipro said it developed the store manager workbench solution for Metro Group, one of the leading retailers in the world.

The solution utilises Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 to gather customer data from in-store systems, ASP.NET applications and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to predict wait times, Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to present the information in real time, and Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 to alert store managers if the wait times exceed a preset limit, it was stated.