(By Anthony Miller – Wednesday, 27th May 2009 9:15 pm). We don’t usually comment on contracts unless they are ’mega’, but my interest was piqued when I saw the recent announcement that TCS had won its first deal with multi-brand car maker, Volkswagen UK. The five-year contract primarily covers infrastructure management services, including system consolidation, virtualisation and remote operations (i.e. cost-cutting).I spoke to TCS UK MD, AS Lakshminraryanan, about the deal. The real significance (to me, anyway) is that (a) TCS beat incumbent T-Systems in open competition, and (b) this is the first time VW has ‘gone offshore’. T-Systems, you may recall, acquired VW’s IT captive, Gedas, in January 2006 and as such was VW’s preferred IT services supplier. T-Systems formed a hybrid ‘partnership’ with Cognizant last March, selling its rather meagre ‘back-end’ offshore captive to the India-based player and then holding hands together to go to market.
Definitely another feather in TCS' cap, and perhaps a signal example to others of the difficulty of making a hybrid onshore/offshore partnership appear as seamless to a customer as a fully integrated delivery model. I would not be in the least bit surprised if VW made further forays into offshore-land leaving T-Systems again very much stranded onshore.
No comments:
Post a Comment