BENGALURU:
Infosys has won two IT outsourcing deals adding up to over $1 billion in the past two months, signalling an improvement in business under CEO
Salil Parekh, who took over at the beginning of the year.
The company has won a $700 million deal from US telecom company Verizon. The deal was clinched last week when Parekh was at Confluence, the company’s annual customer meet in the US.
Sources said Parekh was conspicuously absent on the first day of the three-day event. He is said to have been finalising the Verizon deal, one of the largest IT outsourcing contracts signed by the firm in recent times. The deal involves application development & management (ADM) services and business process management (BPM) services.
Prior to this deal, the company also won a $300 million deal from Microsoft, pipping Germany IT service provider
Arvato. The deal involves Infosys undertaking order management, service desk and contact centre support for four lines of business — Microsoft Dynamics, commercial operations, enterprise services and original equipment manufacturers operations that together represent over 90 per cent of Microsoft’s global revenues. An email sent to Microsoft did not elicit a response.
Microsoft is also a significant account for Infosys on the IT services side. It has an exposure of close to $240 million in application development and infrastructure management services, said sources. Verizon told TOI that it has reached an agreement to transition select functions within Verizon's global information technology (IT) organisation to Infosys. “All impacted employees will receive comparable, competitive offers, and are expected to transition to Infosys in the fourth quarter 2018 to continue performing functions that will now be IT managed services for Verizon. We have an extremely talented team at Verizon and are fortunate to continue to work with them in this new capacity,” the spokesperson said. When TOI reached out to Infosys, the company said it does not comment on client engagements.
The US wireless provider has over 7,000 people in India — in Chennai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru – engaged in supporting Verizon's core business that includes operating its wireless, fiber optic and global IP networks. They also build and maintain infrastructure and data centre, implementing devops and cloud. In the quarter ended June, Infosys won $1.1 billion in large deals, the largest ever in the last several quarters, of which 40 per cent was in financial services.
Phil Fersht, CEO of IT advisory firm HFS Research, said Infosys has found a valuable period of stability, after the turbulence in 2017, and recent new business wins and renewals are testament to enterprise clients showing a newfound confidence in the firm's long-term trajectory. “Salil Parekh has established a motivated team to reinforce the firm's’Pentagon Strategy’ of proximity, design, learning, automation and agile. Now the challenge is to convert stability into real market aggression to attack the likes of TCS and Accenture.”
Jimit Arora, who leads US-based advisory Everest Group’s IT services research practice, said strategy set in place by Parekh has helped create a shared vision for success and aligned the company with what market wants today — digital at speed and IT modernisation.
