Sep. 21, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --
Vishwanath Kulkarni
The contract wins are more prominent in verticals such as energy and utilities, healthcare, retail and telecom, while banking and financial services – the largest spender on IT also seems to be opening up slowly.
A majority of the recent contracts have emerged from the non-US markets mainly in Asia Pacific and the Europe. The Indian vendors are also seen benefiting from the recent vendor consolidation exercise at large IT spenders such as BP Plc, Telstra and Aviva among others.
Upsurge in demand
“There is an upsurge in demand for IT services with more focus towards growth-related spending,” said Mr S. Sabyasachi, partner at advisory firm Tholons Inc.
Customers gearing up for growth post-downturn are looking at discretionary IT spending and those who have held back their spending over the past one, one-and-a-half year seem to be willing to spend in small amounts, he added.
While stating that such a demand was a short-term trigger which is expected to continue till mid-November, Mr Sabyasachi said “a clearer picture on spending would emerge towards the end of the December quarter.” The current indicators suggest that 2010 IT budgets were likely to be flat or marginally down over previous year.
Pleasant surprise
“Pleasantly surprised” at the pace of recovery, Infosys CEO, Mr S. Gopalakrishnan, recently said “we would prefer to wait for two more quarters to see more data points before we say that we are out of the woods”.
Interestingly, the Indian firms have turned more vocal in terms of announcing their new client wins in the past few months.
Mr S. Ramadorai, CEO, TCS, said recently that the deal pipeline was beginning to show and that the company was eyeing integration related work from the US financial services sector that saw several big ticked mergers and acquisitions in the past year.
“Integration deals are coming. We have done some deals related to Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) and Merrill Lynch,” Mr Ramadorai said adding the company wants to see acceleration in deal closures.
Other deals that TCS won in past few months include one from Philippines Deposits Corporation, Cathay United Bank (Taiwan), Mizuho Banking Co (US), Volkswagen and Phones4U.
Wipro Technologies announced deal wins from customers such as All Nippon Airways, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) Siemens (NYSE:SI) Networks, ING Bank, Aviva, Unitech Wireless, Fosters and Charming Shoppes Inc. (NASDAQ:CHRS)
HCL Technologies recently won large deals from Oncor, the largest electric distribution and transmission system in Texas and Energy Future Holdings Corp.
