Wipro Chief Executive Officer Thierry Delaporte recently said that the company has staffed more than a third of its workforce to its cloud business, the company’s fastest-growing vertical, to cater to clients who are looking to shift applications from in-house servers to data centres.

“Wipro employs over 80,000 cloud professionals, and more than 10,000 of our colleagues are now certified by leading cloud-service providers. We have employed more than 40,000 trained professionals in AI over the last few months, built a workforce of 7,500 specialists in the cybersecurity area,” said Delaporte.

The company has won over $2.4-billion worth of deals in the past four quarters, a significant chunk of which was for cloud services that now comprise a third of Wipro’s deal pipeline and generate 70% of new revenue, as reported by Delaporte to analysts.

In June, Wipro announced the launch of its FullStride Cloud Service portfolio and plans to invest $1 billion in cloud capabilities, technologies, acquisitions and partnerships over the next three years. Wipro is also ramping up its crowdsourcing platform TopCoder, which gives it access to another 1.6 million data science experts.

Saurabh Govil, President and Chief Human resources officer at Wipro, added saying that client demand for certain skillsets far outstripped the available supply and the trend was likely to persist going forward. Wipro’s updated rewards programme for freshers now includes consistent value creation through a performance-based bonus and an increment programme.

Wipro is the first top-tier Indian IT firm that has disclosed the amount of talent deployed in a specific growth vertical. The renewed focus on cloud clients has led it to heavily ramp up this employee base, which is in high demand across the industry.