Wipro Limited is a global information technology (IT) services company headquartered in Bangalore, India. According to the 2011 revenue, Wipro is the third largest IT services company in India and employs more than 122,385 people worldwide as of March 2011. Wipro is ranked 31 globally in 2011 in the list of IT service providers. It is 9th most valuable brand in India according to an annual survey conducted by Brand Finance and The Economic Times in 2010. It provides outsourced research and development, infrastructure outsourcing, business process outsourcing (BPO) and business consulting services. The company operates in three segments: IT Services, IT Products, Consumer Care and Lighting.
Wipro Technologies, the global technology and consulting services division of Indian conglomerate Wipro Limited.
The company was established in 1980 as subsidiary of Wipro Limited listed on New York Stock Exchange. Wipro was founded in 1945 by M.H.Hasham Premji in Amalner, Maharashtra, producing sunflower Vanaspati Oil and soaps. At that time, the company was called Western India Vegetable Products Limited (later abbreviated down to Wipro, an acronym of Western India Palm Refined Oils). The company logo still contains a sunflower to reflect their original business. Over the years, Wipro diversified into several unrelated businesses on its own and through subsidiaries. These industries included soaps, wax, tin containers for packaging and crushing. Hasham Premji died in 1966, and was succeeded by his son Azim Premji.
During 1970s and 1980s it shifted its focus and began to look into business opportunities in IT and computing industry which was at nascent stages in India at that time. Wipro was the first company which marketed the first indigenous homemade PC from India in 1975. Wipro's entry into the IT business was helped by lack of competition from IBM, which was asked to leave India by the government in 1977, following a dispute over investment and intellectual property. With its name and brand established, in the early 1980s, Wipro began selling through a dealer network and began assembling products made by such well-known companies as Canon, Cisco Systems, Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Sun.
In 1966 Azim Premji, still the majority shareholder as the chairman of the company at the age of 21 and with the passage of time transformed it into one of the largest IT outsourcing services provider of the world.
By 2000, Wipro Technologies emerged as the largest publicly listed software exporter in India and the first software services provider to be assessed at SEI Level 5 in the world.

The company has the following reportable segments:
i) IT Services: IT Services segment provides IT and IT enabled services such as software application development and maintenance, research and development services for hardware and software design, business process outsourcing services etc.
ii) IT Products: IT Products segment sells a range of Wipro personal desktop computers, servers and notebooks.
iii) Consumer Care and lighting: Consumer Care and Lighting segment manufactures, distributes and sells personal care products, baby care products, lighting products, and hydrogenated cooking oils in the Indian and Asian markets.