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IBM wins $50 Million Idea VAS contract
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 17 September 2009, 19:59 IST
Bangalore: IBM, a global IT services provider has bagged a $50 million, seven-year Value Added Services (VAS) outsourcing contract from India's fifth biggest mobile phone company Idea Cellular. IBM provided technology solutions will help Idea to compete with rivals like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar in VAS sphere, reports the Economic Times.
"The standard telecom outsourcing contracts include services, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and billing. The deal with IBM can potentially give us a competitive edge. The deal is for technology systems, software and services," said Prakash Paranjape, Chief Information Officer, Idea Cellular.
The industry sources estimated the deal at $50 million, as Paranjape denied to confirm the value of the deal. The additional features will help Idea to provide services such as music downloads and cricket scores more intelligently, targeting only those customers who are interested.
"We now have semi skilled workers, rural folks and other peripheral users that are coming in as our subscribers," said Pradeep Shrivastava, Chief Marketing Officer, Idea Cellular.
Idea generates about 10 percent of its revenue from services other than plain vanilla calls and aims to increase it more than 40 percent by the end of contract in 2017. "For IBM, the contract is an opportunity to also innovate in an emerging area," said Ashish Kumar, General Manager, IBM.
The company also has a $700 million technology outsourcing deal with Idea which will end in 2017. It also works with Idea's rivals such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone.
