Source: www.thehindubusinessline.com

Tata Consultancy Services has bagged an over $40 million (Rs 160 crore) transformational engagement from New India Assurance for implementing its core insurance platform across the latter’s 1,100 branch network in the country.

The turnkey engagement – which is spread over a period of eight years — is the first major engagement for TCS in the non-life insurance space, a company spokesperson told Business Line.

As part of the deal, the company will deploy and maintain its insurance suite, TCS BaNCS Insurance.

It will also enable integration of enterprise solutions pertaining to human resources, customer relationship management and business intelligence into the core insurance product, the spokesperson added.

With about 1.5 crore policy holders in the country, New India Assurance is currently the largest non-life insurance company in India.

Revenues from the deal will start kicking in for TCS from the current quarter itself, the company spokesperson added.

IT outsourcing is expected to make the insurance major more productive, so that it can take on increased competition in the space.

Public sector non-life insurance companies have been steadily losing market share in the past few years. In 2006-07, the share dropped to 65 per cent, against 73 per cent in the previous year.

Even though margins in the domestic business have been a cause of concern for IT companies, perceptions of a global slowdown in discretionary spending coupled with the growing IT maturity in India have resulted in the domestic market gaining a lot of importance.

According to a Gartner report, the domestic IT services market is pegged to grow to $10.73 billion by 2011 at a five-year CAGR of 23.2 per cent. Though Indian firms have been laggards in the domestic space, overseas IT companies such as IBM and Accenture have been picking large deals in India.

TCS is now aggressively looking at the domestic IT space.

In an earlier interaction with Business Line, Mr N. Chandrasekaran, Chief Operating Officer of TCS, had said that TCS was pursuing five IT outsourcing deals from Indian firms.

TCS BaNCS Insurance is a part of TCS BaNCS, which was spun off in May last year as a dedicated product company within the TCS fold.

Source: www.itnews.com.au

Outsourcing in Asia Pacific saw its second consecutive year of strong growth and showed an increase in demand across all measures. Although the number of contracts signed in 2007 grew by just four percent, the total contract value increased 30 percent year over year from US$9.9B to US$12.8B, said TPI, a division of information service provider, Information Services Group.

According to TPI, annual revenues showed a 13 percent increase, nearly double that of the global average. Asia Pacific was the only geography to show an increase across all of these measures.

Arno Franz, partner and managing director, TPI Asia Pacific, said the outsourcing market in Asia Pacific grew substantially in 2007, fuelled primarily by increased demand from corporations based in India, stated TPI.

The average value of outsourcing contracts in Asia Pacific increased by 25 percent from US$141M to US$176M, due largely to increased mega relationship activity in the region, especially in the last quarter of 2007. The region showed particular strength in mega relationships with nine signed in 2007 at a total value of US$1.5B.

“This represents one third of the mega relationships globally and contrasts sharply with the region’s overall share of one-sixth of the global outsourcing market. Larger contracts have become popular among companies based in Asia,” he said.

Outsourcing growth in Asia Pacific was largely driven by corporations in India and China - countries traditionally known for their provision of outsourced resources are becoming buyers of outsourcing. India has seen stepped up outsourcing activity within the Telecommunications and Financial Services sectors, whereas growth in China has been strongly influenced by a single telecommunications mega deal, said Franz.

According to TPI’s research, although Australia, India and Japan top the list of countries buying outsourcing services, in 2007 India led the pack by almost doubling the value of its outsourcing work year on year.

“It appears that, fuelled by a booming economy, Indian industry in particular has found outsourcing to be a viable tool to improve performance and drive growth in market share. With increased competition among Indian corporations and the potential privatisation of public sector organisations in the next few years, we expect to see this level of activity continue through 2008 and beyond,” Franz said.

Alongside increased domestic demand for outsourcing, the India-heritage service providers’ share of global contracts continued to expand in 2007, up from a six percent share in 2006 to nine percent in 2007.

According to Franz, no other category of service provider increased market share at such a pace. Their share of the regional market also increased strongly, from 11 percent to 16 percent.