Offshore Vendors : Another Milestone Crossed

While covering the recent ABN Amro deal, I wrote, moving forward, the the basis of competition for IT providers, Indian or multinational companies, will no longer be just the cost-competitive, within-budget deployment of technology. It will soon change to the improvements in clients businesses that can be enabled by these service providers. IT firms have to now turn themselves into partners, helping their customers shape their business future, not merely their technology future. This means IT firms have to now acquire the capability to design potential business scenarios that incorporate and examine various technology alternatives, simulate them, and test them for attractiveness. Future competitive advantage will, in large measure, be defined by mastery over business Solutions. Exciting times lay ahead for the well prepared and the difference between winners and also ran shall keep widening. Economictimes reports that TCS has won a 850 Mill USD deal today. The article says that TCS will take over the entire business processes of Pearl and 950 employees in UK as part of the 850 million USD deal(Surprisingly as I write this I could find any information related to this deal in the TCS website). As of last year we noticed rise in billion dollar outsourcing deals. TCS claims that this decision comes after a rigorous and extensive, year- long, selection process by Pearl Group, who examined tenders from a number of leading companies before they decided to choose TCS. The company sees this win as a validation of its strategy of pioneering the next generation of Business Process Outsourcing opportunities. TCS has large practices on Insurance, Life Sciences & Healthcare (going by published information) - obviously its experience in the insurance industry integrated with deep technology skills must have been seen as a significant differentiator.I am sure analysts may dissect the nature of the deal in the days to come to understand the quality of the deal - this is indeed an important milestone in offshor vendor history, conclusively proving the mettle of offshore giants in taking global majors head on - even in megadeals. No longer big deals are the exclusive preserve/space for the IBM's & Accenture and the competition is clearly even natured and becoming more and more sharply defined.