Source: www.marketwire.com

HCL Technologies Ltd. (’HCL’) today announced an expanded global services partnership with SAP AG, that underscores SAP’s focus on extending its industry lead in ecosystem innovation, and HCL’s focus on delivering value to its customers through collaboration. HCL’s new global services partnership with SAP is aimed at enabling companies of all sizes to access the business benefits of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and draws upon HCL’s strengths in emerging geographies, strong domain experience, risk taking and service innovation capabilities. This announcement is a milestone in a rapidly growing relationship between the two organizations, which further evidences their close links.

As part of the agreement, SAP and HCL will now partner to enhance value and accelerate growth for customers in a manner that will reduce implementation costs while providing strong domain-centric solutions to transform their business processes.

“Spansion is investing heavily in SAP applications and enterprise SOA, with HCL Technologies as one of our key partners,” said Hannelore Stoebbe, CIO of Spansion, Inc. “HCL’s innovative business model focused on value, combined with SAP’s industry-leading business applications, was the natural choice for us to address our business needs. The expanded relationship between the two companies will help us go beyond just extracting maximum value from our investments and creates new benefits for us as a customer.”

“We have been working closely with HCL in one of the early implementations of the SAP Waste and Recycling Industry Solution and an interfacing custom designed dispatch software and mobile system. These have been leading edge projects and HCL’s commitment has been vital in addressing a program which is so important to our future. These complex and mission critical processes are being delivered using HCL’s skills in SAP, software design and development, hardware design and development, and all the required supporting technologies for an end to end process,” said Richard Berry, Executive Director, Veolia Environmental Services.

HCL Technologies - A New SAP Global Services Partner

HCL Technologies joins a select group of the market’s leading consultancies to join the ‘SAP Global Partner - Services’ program. As a new global services partner, HCL Technologies will invest in significantly enhancing its SAP consulting practice and will create dedicated SAP sales resources and supporting marketing activities across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. HCL and SAP will create teams for solution definition, long term engagement and will co-develop new and extended functionalities to implement enterprise SOA based services in specific segments and verticals globally.

“Building a vibrant customer-centric ecosystem is key to supporting our customers’ adoption and realization of the benefits of enterprise SOA,” said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP AG. “Having HCL on board as our newest SAP global services partner is testimony to the outstanding performance they have delivered in support of our business imperatives. Through this partnership, we see them bringing their business model innovation of value-over-volume and customer centricity to our ecosystem of global partners and joint customers.”

“HCL’s global partnership with SAP is a step towards delivering on the promise of a services-based IT approach. By combining SAP’s global market leadership in inter-enterprise solutions with HCL’s domain expertise and focus of creating new markets and solutions through a Blue Ocean strategy, we plan to create and deliver new innovative solutions that deliver unique customer value,” said Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies.

Source: www.computerworld.com

Indian offshore firm Tata Consultancy Services is getting a bigger share of Chrysler LLC’s outsourcing by taking over IT work handled by separate service providers.

Under the agreement made public this week, Tata will be responsible for a variety of IT systems at the automaker, including online vehicle ordering systems for dealers and maintenance of the company’s dealer and brand Web sites, according to David Elshoff, a Chrysler spokesman. He said the consolidation under Tata will deliver greater efficiency for the automaker, but will not affect the jobs of any existing Chrysler employees.

The cost of the contract was not disclosed. Tata officials sent out a note Wednesday indicating the contract is worth $120 million but didn’t say how long it runs. Tata subsequently asked that the figure not be used, but by then it had been published on the Internet and in media sources. Chrysler does not disclose contract terms as a matter of policy, but in this case said that the dollar value claimed by Tata was inaccurate, said Elshoff.

A union at Chrysler, United Auto Workers Local 412, believes that Tata’s role at the company will expand beyond this week’s announcement, at least for one group of employees. Last week, the union group claimed that foreign workers on H-1B visaswere being trained on systems used by recently laid-off employees at its technical center in Auburn Hills, Mich.

Dennis Greathouse, the third vice president of the local, said cost estimators - people with technical backgrounds who look at competitive price issues involved in parts work — believe their jobs will be eventually transfered to Tata. Any such move would affect about 20 employees, he said.

The job of cost estimator pays roughly between $70,000 and $80,000 a year, said Greathouse. “What I have been told is they (Tata) can hire two or three people for one of us,” he said. Greathouse retired last year from Chrysler.