July 22, 2002
Source: Business Standards
Wipro ties up with Avesthagen to explore BT

Jeetha D'Silva
MUMBAI 21 JULY
IT MAJOR Wipro seems to be foused on ramping up its competence in biotechnology. It has recently entered into an alliance with biotech-start-up Avestha Gengraine (Avesthagen} to exploit the convergence between IT and biotechnology.

The two companies have an open ended agreement to work on projects that require competence in both the areas. "We are equal partners bringing in our domain expertise in the areas of biotechnology and information technology respectively," sources said. Avesthagen's research focuses on agricultural biotech and has an expertise in population genomics which could be leveraged by Wipro's newly formed Wipro Healthcare and Life Science, which needs the biology-related expertise. The biotech firm is also involved in bioinformatics, which is basically an in-house support system for gene discovery, annotation of genes and software de- velopment.

Sources said that the two organisations expact their synergies to help establish their presence as leading players in the IT-BT convergence area. They will together be targetting companies in the West that are looking to outsource projects in this area to Indian companies. IT companies venturing into the biotech area are increasingly forgoing alliances with other organisations for this reason. TCS has a partnership with the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting Dianostics at Hyderabad and Bangalore based Strand Genomics has a tie up with Syngene.