TCS wins South African broadcast project

Monday, 02 December 2002, 20:30 IST
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JOHANNESBURG: India's Tata Consulting Services (TCS) has won a major project from South Africa's national public broadcaster to help overhaul its IT systems. "There was a selection process involving many countries in which we looked at the IT expertise across the globe," Sharoda Rapeti, managing director for technology at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), said. "There were many aspects that stood out about Tata," Rapeti said, pointing out the Indian company's known excellence in international software development and project management. "Our thinking was that we needed to access the strongest technical expertise -- in mainframes, enterprise resource planning, and to people who have done systems with almost zero tolerance in the project, such as in banking." Tata has joined forces with local companies Arivia and Safika. Arivia has done the implementation of IT projects for huge corporations locally. "SABC has a very large legacy system infrastructure. Over the last few years we have been implementing various client server applications, but we were not implementing against a set roadmap," Rapeti said. Said TCS' Anantha Simha, the team leader for the project: "From our perspective, this is one of the largest projects of its kind. We are very happy to be part of it. We are the project managers and technical managers of the project. "We are bringing in the generic IT experience, methodology and expertise we have had in the broadcast field from other broadcast projects at NBC in the U.S." Simha said a lot of the evolving new media technologies used in the broadcast area was something Tata could contribute to. "It has been a wonderful learning experience for us and we will take back all this experience with us."
Source: IANS