TCS lands US$3.3M deal with Temasek
CHENNAI--Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has inked a business performance management deal with Singapore's Temasek Holdings.
Announced Wednesday, the S$5 million (US$3.3 million) agreement will allow the Indian IT company to provide services around the Hyperion product suite for Temasek.
TCS said the deal is aimed at addressing Temasek's need for a Web-based information management software, as well as a data warehouse that will form the backbone of its management decision-support system.
Specifically, TCS will provide Temasek with data acquisition, data storage, financial consolidation and modeling, as well as reporting capabilities.
Girija Pande, executive vice president and head of TCS Asia Pacific, said in a statement: "The solution we're implementing for Temasek Holdings automates the consolidation of information across the many departments and systems they have, and provides them with an integrated multidimensional view of their business."
Alan Thompson, managing director of value management at Temasek, added: "As an active and responsible investor, Temasek maintains the highest standards of governance. With operations in multiple markets and sectors, we need our information systems to be able to support and manage our operations."
TCS' Temasek deal is the latest in the company's list of big customers in the Asia-Pacific region. Last November, together with another Indian IT services company Satyam, it bagged an outsourcing deal worth US$146.6 million to maintain Australian airline Qantas' key IT applications.
During a media briefing Tuesday in Mumbai, Pande reiterated the importance of the Asia-Pacific in the company's growth strategy. TCS has 13 offices in the region.
"The biggest populations are in the Asia-Pacific, and region is forecasted to have the highest rate of GDP (gross domestic product) growth," Pande said. He added that the growth rate for IT spending is also expected to increase across the logistics, transport and banking sectors.
According to Pande, the Asia-Pacific region presents opportunities for TCS. For instance, Japan will see an increasing need to offshore IT jobs to China and India in order to fill the gaps left by its aging workforce, he said.
In addition, he noted, as large domestic companies in the region start to expand their operations abroad, TCS--with its global network of IT service delivery centers--will be presented with more business opportunities.
Faced with a shortage of IT workers in India, the Asia-Pacific region is also a talent pool for TCS, Pande said. "We want to actively recruit people in the region, because at some stage, India will start running out of people," he noted.
He added that Asia-Pacific is a good breeding ground for research and development. He singled out Japan and Singapore, where TCS has worked with Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology to produce a next-generation industrial controller--called SmartBox--for distributed, collaborative, complex and mission-critical control applications.
According to Pande, Asia-Pacific contributes 4.5 percent of TCS' revenues, which totaled US$2.97 billion in fiscal 2006, ended Mar. 31. He added that the company has been growing at 48 percent year-on-year for the last two years across the region.
Aaron Tan from ZDNet Asia reported from Chennai, India.