TCS wins US$90 million Qantas deal

Stan Beer
Thursday, 09 November 2006 17:31

IT Industry - Deals

Indian IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services, has signed a seven-year deal with an expected value of around A$120 Million (US$90 million) with Australian flagship airline Qantas to provide a range of IT application, transformation and maintenance services. The Qantas contract is the largest single agreement awarded to an Indian outsourcing company in Australia to date.

Under the contract, TCS will provide support and maintenance to all of Qantas’ key IT applications for airport operations and commercial systems.

“The Qantas engagement is a significant milestone for TCS’ airline business and is the result of our extensive investments in building domain expertise that has helped create innovative solutions for companies,” said S. Ramadorai, CEO and Managing Director. “We believe technology has a strong role to play in enabling the travel and hospitality sector companies to retain customers and build new business models,” Mr Ramadorai added.

“TCS sees Australia as playing a pivotal role in growing our regional airline business and our long-term engagement with Qantas will be seen as a resounding endorsement of our skills in this domain by other airline and travel businesses in the Region,” said Girija Pande, executive vice president and Head of Asia Pacific. “TCS is one of few companies that can offer integrated IT and BPO services to support a range of processes across an airline. This group will also provide support to Qantas with TCS experts to be based in Australia,” Mr Pande added.

“Qantas will derive significant productivity improvements over the life of this engagement based on the process changes in operations and systems that will be introduced by TCS,” said Rick Marmur, vice president and country manager, Australia and New Zealand. “With responsibility for the majority of Qantas’ critical IT systems, TCS expects to deliver increased efficiency and productivity improvement over the seven year period,” Mr Marmur added.

Qantas will access TCS’ new Innovation Lab for Travel and Hospitality, located in Chennai, India. The Lab incubates, develops and pilots new solutions for emerging technologies such as RFID, wireless and digital asset management.

Interestingly, rival Indian IT services provider Satyam Computer Services also announced today that it has signed a seven-year contract with Qantas. The agreement covers application development and maintenance services for over 150 applications across a wide portfolio of technologies.