TopCoder: Wipro sees a winner in TopCoder

Bengaluru: As remote working turns mainstream, Wipro is betting on TopCoder to hire gig workers to service clients.

Wipro bagged TopCoder, a marketplace with nearly 1.5 million freelance engineers, data scientists and designers in 2016, as part of its $500-million acquisition of Appirio, an IT firm that helps clients migrate to the cloud-based customer relationship management platform Salesforce.

The marketplace allows coders to bid for work and deliver them for a fee.

Engineers on the TopCoder platform have built mobile applications that run the International Space Station, helped crack bugs in software developed by large product firms and created new applications that solve business problems for companies.

Wipro has used freelancers on the platform to build internal projects. With clients agreeing on a remote working model (93% of Wipro employees are delivering services remotely), Wipro is hoping to use TopCoder to hire gig workers on projects if clients approve.

“If it is remote it can be anywhere,” Saurabh Govil, chief human resources officer of Wipro told ET. This was the first time that remote working was taking place on a large scale at the company as well as the IT industry, he added.