“Wipro’s Gaming and Animation Practice focuses on outsourced services in the areas of entertainment games, serious games and serious animation.”
Not Ripples, Not Puddles, but Waves….That’s what the Indian Gaming and Animation vertical is making as well as experiencing these days.
Yet another symbol of this vertical’s growth potential in the country, is the recent entry of IT and Technology major WIPRO into Gaming and Animation.
As 2007 commenced, AnimationXpress Anand Gurnani met up with Wipro Gaming & Animation practice head Manoj Mishra to know more about the company’s plans..
For Indian Animation & Gaming, 2007, its Happy New Year indeed!
Excerpts…
What is the road map for WIPRO’s Gaming & Animation division?
Wipro’s Gaming and Animation Practice focuses on outsourced services in the areas of entertainment games, serious games and serious animation. Moving forward, we would be gradually edging into the Co-Production Model and IP creation.
Where will you be located, please elaborate on the strategy for selecting the location?
Our Gaming and Animation Center of Excellence is based out of Hyderabad. We also have a Games Testing lab in place, which is also based out of Hyderabad.
The decision to choose Hyderabad as the location for the Gaming and Animation COE is based on Wipro�s presence in that area along with the excellent infrastructure already in place and availability of skilled manpower.
Your comments on the opportunities that you see in the Animation & Gaming space?
NASSCOM has estimated the global market size of the Games and Animation industry at $30.8 billion in the year 2005, poised to grow up to approximately $46 billion by the year 2009. Though Entertainment sector would account for a significant portion of the animation market, the trend in the Gaming and Animation space is the rise of Serious Games.
Serious Games are games that are used for serious applications. This is right now a fledgling industry, but is expected to grow at a very rapid rate. Given Wipro�s strong engineering presence with industry leaders in Medical, Aerospace, Automotive Electronics etc, we are expecting to have a strong presence in this space.
Please list a few of the Industry best practices and philosophy that you look to incorporate into your Animation & Gaming practice as WIPRO?
Wipro delivers unmatched business value to customers through a combination of process excellence, quality frameworks and service delivery innovation. Wipro is the World�s first CMMi Level 5 certified software services company and the first outside USA to receive the IEEE Software Process Award.
We plan to percolate this to the Gaming and Animation Practice. We would thrive to bring in a process and quality orientation to this industry.
Will your business model revolve around IP or will it be more services driven?
As of now we are focusing on Outsourced services in the Gaming and Animation space, though we do not rule out the possibility of Co-Production and IP creation in Gaming and Animation space.
Additional Comments
Gaming and Animation Practice is a part of Wipro�s Product Engineering Solutions (PES) Group. Wipro�s PES group has more than 13,500 people and offer a complete range of R&D services ranging from product strategy to software development to quality consulting for clients. PES has more than 200 active clients in industries such as automotive, medical devices, software products, semiconductor, platforms and peripherals and consumer electronics. R&D services now accounts for 36 percent of Wipro�s total revenues.