IT majors in race for the Bharti Airtel billion-dollar outsourcing contract
By siliconindia   |   Friday, 23 July 2010, 19:26 IST   |    5 Comments
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IT majors in race for the Bharti Airtel billion-dollar outsourcing contract
NEW DELHI: Five IT majors have been shortlisted for the Bharti Airtel billion-dollar-plus IT outsourcing contract in Africa, which includes three multinational firms and two home-grown IT organizations. People close to the matter indicate that IBM, HP, Accenture, Wipro and Tech Mahindra are in race for the deal, reports Shivapriya N and Joji Thomas Philip from Economic Times. IBM, Hewlett Packard and Accenture are among the multinational vendors that have bid for the deal while Wipro and Tech Mahindra are the Indian vendors who have made it to the shortlist. IBM, which currently handles Bharti's IT in India and Sri Lanka, is reportedly facing stiff competition from the attractive terms and conditions offered by other IT firms in the fray. Sources close to the deal also indicated that Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services are no longer in the race. In April-end Bharti Airtel had invited Request for Information or RFI to outsource operations worth over a billion dollars for African assets it acquired from Kuwait's Zain Telecom, suggesting it is looking for better deals than those being offered by its existing partners. It is learnt that a number of IT firms had made presentations to Bharti Airtel's management in response to its RFI. IBM, Wipro and Tech Mahindra have already IT deals with many leading telcos in the country but HP and Accenture are yet to win any large deals from the Indian telecom players.

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