A graduate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Azim Premji turned what was then a $2 million cooking fat company to an $8 billion Revenue IT, BPO and R&D Services organization. He took over the company as its chairman almost half a century ago and made the company one of the India's largest publicly traded companies. In 1979, Indian government expelled IBM from the country, and Premji tapped Wipro into the emerging computer hardware and software market and began moving Wipro into the computer business. Azim Premji's Wipro has a revenue of 840 crores USD now and with 160,000+ workforce serving clients in 175+ cities across six continents. He believes that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things when organized into highly charged teams. Currently, Azim Premji is the Chairman at Wipro Technologies, Founder at Azim Premji Foundation, and Owner at PremjiInvest.

Electronic product evolution in India:
In the 70s and early 80s, the public sector companies such as Bharat Electronics and later private firms like Wipro, HCL and a few more filled in the gap for electronic products when the economy was controlled. Though the end consumer had limited choice, quality expectations were never lowered. Developing computing and telecom products for the local market, Indian firms learnt the nuances of product development and continued to innovate the overall product development cycle. During this time, a small workforce put together robust foundations for what was to come.

These foundations proved to be of tremendous assistance when the economy opened up in the 90s. By this time, the Indian engineer had acquired skills to develop products around the latest architectures and with a high degree of quality.

Since then, the Product Engineering industry has never looked back. Growing at an incredible pace and expanding the expertise areas beyond the telecom and computing domains to automotive, medical devices, industrial electronics, consumer electronics and of course, mobile devices. What's more these firms in India have learnt to leverage the best practices from across the domains they operate in. Example: the learning from a high-reliability product in automotive are deployed in security applications to ensure a fail-safe environment.

Over the years, as India developed as an IT hub, the product design centers have been a crucial component of the industry. Both in terms of outsourced third party design centers and India development centers of MNCs. The Indian Development Centers of multinational firms and India based service providers have been stepping up their efforts in the recent years. We have seen the overall embedded exports growing at close to 40 percent CAGR for the past 6 years. Working across multiple domains, India's name has now become synonymous with offshore product development.