Indian IT still bagging major international orders
28 Jan 2009
Inspite of the Satyam debacle and dire warning from various analysts about the incident shaking up the confidence in the IT industry in particular and India Inc in general, here is the software industry silently forging ahead.
Tata Consultancy Services today disclosed that it had signed a $100-million agreement to provide a full range of managed IT services to 4UGroup, the holding company behind Phones 4U and other organisations in the UK telecommunication and financial services marketplaces.
These are not business contracts which has resulted as a fall out from Satyam. Exceptt for State Farm Insurance Company, a Fortune 500 giant, having cancelled its long-standing contract with Satyam Computer Service Ltd earlier this month, even Satyam has managed to hold on to its clients till now, despite talks of others like UK retail giant Tesco and Australian telecom firm Telstra relooking at their contracts.
Clients have shown due diligence and many of the larger clients have asked questions and even visited the head offices of software majors in India to reassure themselves about the vitality of the outsourcers.
Spending on IT has drastically reduced with one of its main verticals - the financial sector - experiencing a meltdown like never before. The fourth quarter of the year has seen a decline of 22 per cent in software outsourcing. The worse is still to come in 2009 and 2010 with new budget allocations.
Indian outsourcing also faces challenges from emerging outsourcing countries in South-East Asia and South America.
Though the challenges exist, Indian software companies have been bagging new contracts as well as renewing old ones. The confidence of the global corporate sector is as strong as ever.
Other major IT projects bagged in January
- Catholic Mutual group has chosen Mastek's STG billing system. Mastek's primary domain focus is the Government and Insurance verticals, which together contribute to a large amount of their business revenues. Mastek endeavors to be the leading provider of integrated solutions in both these verticals.
- Wipro Technologies has bagged a project this month worth million dollars from UK based food retailer Morrisons, having 375 stores and annual turnover of £13bn, to transform its IT systems and upgrading old technical infrastructure (See: Morrisons partners with Wipro for systems transformation)
The project would be completed by a specialist division of Wipro Technologies, Wipro Retail. It is aimed to help Morrisons to achieve its growth targets by increasing its business efficiency. The project would be executed using an Oracle ERP platform to make planning, management and delivery reliable and result oriented. Wipro Retail is known for its efficient manufacturing, testing and business intelligence / data warehousing.
- Raiffeisen International, the second-largest international banking group in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has selected Finacle from Infosys to standardise its technology platform and enable consolidation of operations across CEE. Raiffeisen International is a fully-consolidated subsidiary of Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG. As part of the agreement, Infosys will implement version 10 of Finacle Universal Banking Solution across multiple countries in parallel. This will include deployment of Finacle core banking, CRM, e-banking, mobile, and alerts solutions.
- TCS has signed a multi-million dollar, multi-year agreement with Ducati to deliver technology-based services that will help improve customer responsiveness and business efficiency. As a first assignment TCS has been awarded an ERP engagement for Ducati Motor Holding and its subsidiaries in Europe. TCS partnered with KPMG Advisory Italy for this assignment (See: TCS inks deal to with Ducati for technology-based services)
