HCL $350m outsourcing deal with Reader's Digest

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 17 March 2009 19:54

IT Industry - Deals

In a deal worth more than $350 million, Indian IT global services provider, HCL Technologies has entered into a seven year outsourcing services contract with Reader's Digest.

Announcing the deal, senior vice president North America for HCL’s subsidiary services company, HCLT ISD, R Srikrishna, said the contract with the Reader’s Digest Association (RDA), involved a complex transformational engagement covering end-to-end of RDA’s IT landscape from IT infrastructure to applications.

Srikrishna said the contract involved applications development and infrastructure support across the applications stack of Oracle Universe, Open Technologies and Mainframe; Infrastructure support for network, security, storage, end user computing and data centres (DC) including disaster recovery services. It also included DC and application portfolio optimisation to consolidate applications globally and refresh of legacy assets to modernise Reader’s Digest’s IT environment.
 
HCL will also rebuild and migrate the RDA’s mainframe environment in its New Jersey data centre facility and implement what Srikrishna described as ‘cutting-edge tools framework’ to provide business-aligned, unified, real-time visibility into the health of the IT environment.
 
Al Perruzza, senior VP for global operations, IT and business redesign for RDA, said IT was a key enabler to the company’s business and he expected that HCL would bring down cost of operations significantly, while improving services and bringing cutting-edge technology and capabilities to transform the company’s IT functionality and service.

According to Srikrishna, the deal with Reader’s Digest is yet another landmark engagement not only for HCL but the entire Indian IT industry.

“With its large scale and complex scope and global scale it re-asserts our capabilities in delivering truly transformational and globally delivered IT services. We are pleased to have been selected by RDA and are working hard on flawless execution.”

According to HCL, the company currently manages more than 800,000 mission critical devices systems and supports 500,000 business users.