Despite the general slowdown, information technology services provider HCL Technologies has announced four big deals since January. Of these, three are with global giants Xerox, Nokia and Reader’s Digest Association (RDA), while one is with National Insurance Company (NIC).
In addition, HCL is reported to have also won a five-year, $170 million (Rs 850 crore) IT services contract from software giant Microsoft. The company declined comment on this.
The $100 million (Rs 500 crore) deal with Xerox, announced today, is one of the largest data centre services engagement ever entrusted to an Indian service provider. The contract includes mid-range services, business continuity and disaster recovery for Xerox’s information management operations. HCL will manage data centre hosting and migration, virtualisation, consolidation and storage architecture services for Xerox across North America and Europe. Under the deal, it will also provide architecture and consulting services for new technology and system design as well as lifecycle improvement.
With RDA, HCL had signed a $350 million (Rs 1,750 crore) contract, the largest global integrated IT services engagement won by an Indian company this fiscal.
The deal with Nokia was one of the largest end-to-end global helpdesk and desktop management outsourcing engagements.
On how the company is able to win such big-ticket deals even in the current slowdown, Anant Gupta, president, HCL Technologies Infrastructure Services Division, said, “We see the economic slowdown as an opportunity to sharpen our focus and we continue to press the accelerator by investing more. It has helped us align our motivations to our customer’s objectives. We are aggressively increasing our investments by consulting our customers in newer ways to reduce cost, expanding our global delivery footprint and offering innovative and alternative delivery models.”
On the domestic front, HCL signed a multi-crore end-to-end IT services engagement covering the entire IT lifecycle — from transformation to integration and operations management — with NIC, a general insurance company. It’s a seven-year deal valued at Rs. 393 crore.
The company’s shares closed at Rs 112.1 today, up 5.01 per cent from the previous close, on the BSE.