IT majors to bid for pie in Reliance network

Global IT majors are making a beeline for Reliance Industries' technological backbone that is being set up for the rollout of its retail initiative.

The network is being hailed as the biggest in the world and is expected to go live in December, with the Mukesh Ambani group slated to put out a functional requirement specification (FRS) within a fortnight.

"Reliance Industries has conducted initial discussions with major companies for the project and after the rollout of the FRS, it will begin inviting bids from across the world. The company has also initiated discussions with a number of global IT majors, while the technologies that are going to be implemented are yet to be finalised," a source close to the development told Business Standard.

The company had initiated talks with Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, IBM Global, Cisco Systems, Alien Technologies Corp, AeroScout, Philips and Siemens for hardware, apart from system integrators like Infosys, IBM and Satyam. On the software front Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Wipro are the other companies Reliance is in talks with.

When contacted Reliance officials declined to comment, however, a company source said that this is one of the largest IT projects in the world, with the cost estimated to run into "thousands of crores".

The project would be one of the largest in the world, as the backbone will have to connect to over 2,000 stores across the length and breadth of the country.

The backbone itself is a major one, with thousands of servers and computers, which would be working on myriad platforms and a combination of technologies.

For example, for product tracking the company is looking at myriad technologies like RFID, GPRS, bar codes and GSM among others.

Apart from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, a need for integrating the software and hardware, system integration would be the main challenge, and Indian systems integrators like - Infosys and Satyam - are also expected to play a major role in the project.