Friday, February 03, 2006

Wipro says GM contract worth about US$300mln

Software services provider Wipro said on Thursday its share of the information technology outsourcing contract announced by General Motors was estimated at US$300 million over five years.

On Thursday General Motors said it had awarded about US$7.5 billion worth of business from the US$15 billion it expects to spend over the next five years on IT to a clutch of technology companies including Wipro.
The others are Electronic Data Systems, International Business Machines, Hewlett-Packard, Cap Gemini and the Compuware Covisint unit of Compuware Corp.

Sudip Banerjee, Wipro's President, Enterprise Solutions, told a news conference in the southern Indian city of Bangalore that Wipro would be involved in the development and maintenence of middleware — software that helps a variety of applications work together as if they were a single system.

The additional revenue will start flowing in from the second quarter of the next financial year, which ends in March 2007, he said. He did not indicate how the revenue flow would be spread over the period of the contract.

Wipro, which already works with GM on some projects, will double the number of people working for GM to 1000 from the second quarter, he said.
Some 40-60 percent of the work in the latest contract will be done from India, he said.

Indian companies are increasingly joining the ranks of global technology companies winning parts of such large multi-year, outsourcing contracts.

Wipro was the only Indian company to be awarded any work in the latest GM contract.
Last year, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies were among five firms in the US$2.2 billion IT outsourcing deal awarded by ABN AMRO.
For details read here.

The article is sponsored by A-1 Technology Inc, dealing in software outsourcing, offshore outsourcing and offshore software development.