TCS eyeing Indian Railways outsourcing contract

Software major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is eyeing a Rs.2,500-crore Indian Railways outsourcing contract, a top company official said here Thursday.

"CMC and we will certainly look at it very seriously, it needs lot of experience. We have done projects for the British and US railways," TCS chief executive and managing director S. Ramadorai told reporters on the sidelines of a seminar organised by Calcutta Management Association.

CMC is another Tata group software company.

Incidentally, rival outsourcer Wipro is also eyeing the contract.

The railways ministry plans to procure a human resources management system and other modules for integrating and automating its payroll, accounting and pension functions.

Talking about the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector's performance after the slowdown, he said: "BFSI has stabilized during the last quarter. Signs of bottoming out is visible as some of them have declared handsome results."

TCS derives 44 percent of its revenues from the BFSI sector, Ramadorai said, adding that other deals in the pipeline were "healthy".

As for hiring during the ongoing slowdown, he said his company was looking at "a balance" of domestic and international recruitments.

TCS recruited 18,000 professionals last year.

"Last year in India, TCS hired 18,000 professionals and those people will be joining from the third quarter this fiscal," Ramadorai said.

Asked about fresh acquisition plans, he said organic growth would drive the company's future strategies. "We make very strategic acquisitions."

Last year, the company acquired Citigroup Global Services, the India-based business process outsourcing (BPO) division of Citigroup.

Earlier, in his address at the seminar, Ramadorai said TCS would remain focused with its investment and expansion plans in Latin America and Europe as it envisaged "much room to grow" in these markets.

TCS launches Provider Performance Insight

Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today announced the launch of Provider Performance Insight, a business intelligence (BI) solution built on SAP Business Objects software for hospitals and other healthcare providers.

Using its proprietary BI framework, TCS has developed an out-of-the-box dashboard that will simplify projects, reduce costs and dramatically shorten time to value related to both hospital administration and patient care, TCS said in a release here.

Hospitals have traditionally not embarked on end-to-end data warehousing and analysis due to perceived high costs, high complexity and long gestation period.

Typical BI projects in other industries can take 12 months for initial results and up to 18 months for completion. In response, TCS' Provider Performance Insight takes just three to five months to deploy and provides end-to-end solutions for both administrative and clinical processes to enhance patient services and improve strategic decision making.

''The escalating cost of healthcare makes it imperative for all healthcare providers to evaluate efficiencies in every aspect of their business,'' said Debashis Ghosh, head of Life Sciences and Healthcare at TCS.

''Both patient care and operational effectiveness need to be evaluated, improved and tracked on an ongoing basis and this will be enabled by our solution,'' he added.

The Provider Performance Insight solutions would offer a snapshot of patient care delivery activities, effective performance evaluations of patient service, ability to optimize staffing levels to reduce overall cost, power to track and trend staffing ratios over multiple periods, real-time assessment of overall financial status, ability to compare revenue across peer organisations or departments and increase revenue across clinical service lines.

TCS Life Sciences and Healthcare division is a decade old, sixth largest group within TCS, serving Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Bio-technology and Medical Device companies for their Business and IT needs.

From Bioinformatics to Clinical Trials to Healthcare, TCS delivers solutions and services across varied business areas with a experienced workforce of more than 6000.

TCS to launch platforms for finance and accounting and procurement

Information Technology giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will be launching its platform-based BPO services for financing and accounting besides procurement.

The company last year launched platform-based BPO, which involved combining IT with operations, to creat a standardised technology led platform for process execution.

TCS had chosen platform based BPO as part of its non linear growth strategies and looks to it as an important long term growth initiative. It had already launched platforms in areas such as life and pension processing and human resource outsourcing.

The company, which had made a strategic acquisition of the capitive BPO unit of the Citigroup last year to suppliment its portfolio of offerings for the global banking and financial services industry, has now emerged the second largest integrated BPO player from India with over 25,000 professionals, including 12,000 from the Citigroup BPO acquisition with the combined revenues of the TCS BPO and its subsidiaries.

The BPO operations now emcompass seven verticals executing over one billion plus transactions. The BPO revenue stood at Rs 1919 crore last fiscal up from Rs 1402 crore the previous year.

The company in its Annual Report for 2008-09 had stated that besides Platform BPO the non linear growth strategies also encompased asset leveraged solutions and small and medium business initiatives.

One of the pillars of assets leveraged solutions was TCS financial solutions, a strategic business initiative focussing on building and selling software products to global financial services industry from capital markets and securities trading and settlement besides core banking products.

It also offered other risk compliance and private banking products. Other verticals in which the company was in frameworks and solutions included government and life sciences.

The strategic business unit for the Small and Medium businesses offered IT as a service, an innovative business model under which the company would provide and manage IT remotely to SMEs and charge them on a subscription basis.

The services and solutions within this framework included core business applications such as ERP, CRM, Finance and accounting.

India's Largest Telecommunications Company Signs Contract for Convergys Solution to Lower IT Costs and Launch Convergent Services

Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG), a global leader in relationship management, announced today that Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has signed a multi-year licensing, support, and maintenance contract for Convergys' Infinys (R) rating and billing solution. BSNL will replace its legacy billing systems with the Convergys solution to reduce IT costs and to facilitate the introduction and deployment of new convergent services. BSNL is India's largest and the world's seventh largest telecommunications company providing a comprehensive range of telecom services.

The Convergys solution will support BSNL's 18 million wireline subscribers. It is a real-time charging product that supports IP and IMS network technologies, convergent and online charging, and next-generation business models. In addition to facilitating revenue growth through the delivery of new advanced services and bundled offerings, the Convergys solution will help BSNL lower IT costs by consolidating and eliminating redundant systems, utilizing a distributed open source platform, and limiting the need to pay for expensive and time-consuming custom system or application development.

"World class telecommunications companies like BSNL realize the importance of their customer relationships as they compete in very competitive and rapidly deregulating markets," said Iain Hackett, Convergys' Vice President, Asia Pacific Region. "As such, a convergent billing and care platform like Infinys is a requirement to better manage customer relationships, drive greater value from them, and attract and retain new customers."

The Convergys solution is being delivered in conjunction with Tata Consultancy Services, a leading IT services, Business Solutions, and Outsourcing firm. Tata will provide project management, business requirement analysis, solution definition, configuration, installation, testing, and data migration, as needed.

About Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL)

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), formed in October, 2000, is the world's 7th largest telecommunications company providing a comprehensive range of telecom services: Wireline, CDMA mobile, GSM Mobile, Internet, Broadband, Carrier service, MPLS-VPN, VSAT, VoIP services, IN Services, etc. Within a span of five years it has become one of the largest public sector units in India.

BSNL is largest operator in India in all service areas. BSNL's cellular service, CellOne, has more than 17.8 million cellular customers, garnering 24 percent of all mobile users as its subscribers. That means that almost every fourth mobile user in the country has a BSNL connection. In basic services, BSNL is miles ahead of its rivals, with 35.1 million basic phone subscribers or 85 per cent share of the subscriber base and 92 percent share in revenue terms.

About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)

Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, business solutions, and outsourcing organization that delivers real results to global businesses, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled services delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development.

A part of the Tata Group, India's largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 108,000 of the world's best trained IT consultants in 47 countries. The Company generated consolidated revenues of US $4.3 billion for fiscal year ended 31 March, 2007 and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com

About Convergys

Convergys Corporation (NYSE: CVG) is a global leader in relationship management. We provide solutions that drive more value from the relationships our clients have with their customers and employees. Convergys turns these everyday interactions into a source of profit and strategic advantage for our clients.

For 25 years, our unique combination of domain expertise, operational excellence, and innovative technologies has delivered process improvement and actionable business insight to clients that now span more than 70 countries and 35 languages.

Convergys is a member of the S&P 500 and has been voted a Fortune Most Admired Company for eight consecutive years. We have approximately 75,000 employees in 84 customer contact centers and other facilities in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and our global headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more information, visit www.convergys.com

Be British, buy Indian - live life the Tata way!

Sip Tetley tea in the morning, drive a Jaguar built with Corus steel to office, work with Tata Consultancy software and over the weekend take your Land Rover to the countryside before fine dining in a Taj hotel.
This seems to be the message of the $28.8 billion Tata group to the British people. For Tetley, Corus, Jaguar and Land Rover are UK based companies taken over by the Indian group.
The Tatas own 98 operating companies around the world with a market capitalization of $56.52 billion.
The acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover takes the overseas operating companies to 100, another landmark number.

The Tata's passage to Britain is over 100 years old through Tata Limited, a subsidiary of Tata Sons.
However it was in the new millennium that the Tata group initiated its new phase of globalisation when it acquired the Tetley tea brand - the market leader in Britain and Canada.
Tetley contributes a lion's share of the Tatas' tea business today.
The next major acquisitions came in 2005 when Tata Chemicals bought the soda ash maker Brunner Mond Group, Tata Technologies acquired INCAT International a technology company and TCS bought the business process outsourcing (BPO) division of Pearl Group.
The year 2007 saw Tatas acquiring British steel maker Corus, one of the largest European steel makers.
And on Wednesday the group announced the acquisition of two more iconic British brands - Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Company, US.
All these acquisitions make Britain a major overseas market for the Indian group.
At the last count the Indian group has around 20 companies in Britain and several thousand employees.
On the information technology domain, TCS has a good presence in Britain and Ireland while Tata Interactive Systems operates in the e-learning space.
Tata Motors has an engineering technology centre in Warwick while the group's hotel chain Taj has two hotels in Britain.
The telecom company VSNL International also has a presence in Britain.
Indo-Asian News Service

TCS Asks 500 Employees To Resign (TCS Layoff)

India’s leading software services company, TCS, have announced that around 500 employees have been asked to resign due to their poor performance.
The company review staff performance twice a year where staff are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Staff with low scores are either asked to re-train or sent for counselling depending on their role. Staff who are unable to meet the performance requirements are asked to find work elsewhere.

It has been speculated that IT companies have started actually tough regarding employee productivity as a result of the rupee rising against the dollar.
In the last quarter of 2007 TCS employeed 4,037 new employees taking the total number up to 108,229. A year previous to this the total headcount was 83,500.

About TCS:
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is one of the world's leading information technology companies. Through its Global Network Delivery Model™, Innovation Network, and Solution Accelerators, TCS focuses on helping global organizations address their business challenges effectively.

TCS continues to invest in new technologies, processes, and people which can help its customers succeed. From generating novel concepts through TCS Innovation Labs and academic alliances, to drawing on the expertise of key partners, it keeps clients operating at the very edge of technological possibility.

Whether TCS is envisioning a business advantage, engineering an IT solution, or executing an outsourcing strategy, it helps its customers experience certainty in their every day business.

TCS reported 2006-07 global revenues of USD 4.3 billion.