Tata Consultancy Services

Tata Consultancy Services

File:TCSL.JPG
Company type	Public BSE: 532540
Industry	Software
Founded	1968
Headquarters	TCS House, Raveline Street, Fort, Mumbai - 400 001
Key people	Tata, (Chairman of the Board, Tata Group) S Ramadorai, (CEO and Managing Director) S Mahalingam, (Executive Director and CFO) N Chandrasekaran, (Executive Director and COO) Phiroz Vandrevala,(Executive Director and Head, Global Corporate Affairs) Ajoyendra Mukherjee, (Vice President and Head, Global Human Resources)
Services	Information technology services and solutions
Revenue	$5.7 billion (in FY 2007-08)
Number of employees	116,308 (As on March 31st, 2008)
Website	[1]

Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is an Indian software services and consulting company. It is one of India's oldest and largest providers of information technology and business process outsourcing services. As of 2007, it is Asia's largest information technology firm. The company is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India.

TCS is part of one of Asia's largest conglomerates, the Tata Group, which has interests in areas such as energy, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, chemicals, engineering and materials.

History

Tata Consultancy Services was established in the year 1968. It began as the "Tata Computer Centre", a division of the Tata Group, whose main business was to provide computer services to other group companies. However, the potential of computerization and computer services was realized early on, and an electrical engineer from the Tata Electric Companies, Fakir Chand Kohli, was brought in as the first General Manager. Soon after, the company was named Tata Consultancy Services.

TCS's first software export project was undertaken in 1974 when it converted the Hospital Information System from Burroughs Medium Systems COBOL to Burroughs Small Systems COBOL. This project was carried out entirely in TCS Mumbai on the ICL 1903 Computer. In 1980, TCS and a sister Tata firm accounted for 63% of the Indian software industry exports, $4 million shared by 21 firms. In 1984, TCS set up an office in the Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ) – Mumbai.

The early 1990s saw a tremendous surge in TCS's business, which also resulted in a massive recruitment drive by the company. In early and mid-1990s, TCS re-invented itself to become a software products company. In the late 1990s, to accelerate its revenue growth, TCS decided to employ a three-pronged strategy – developing new products with high revenue earning potential, tapping domestic and other fast growing markets and focusing on inorganic growth through mergers & acquisitions. In late 1998, the company decided to concentrate on new revenue opportunities including Y2K and Euro conversion. E-business was a major area of focus in the late 1990s.

In 2004, TCS became a publicly listed company.

Offices and development centres

Indian branches

TCS has development centres and/or regional offices in the following Indian cities: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Vadodara, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Goa, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai,Noida, Pune, Siruseri, Kanpur Thiruvananthapuram,Visakhapatnam .

Global units

Africa: South Africa

Asia (outside India): Bahrain, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, UAE

Australia: Australia

Europe: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

North America: Canada, Mexico, USA

South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay

List of acquisitions

TCS has done a number of acquisitions in the past, both in India and abroad. The table below highlights the key acquisitions

Number	Acquisition Date	Company	Business	Country	Value	Headcount	Remarks	Reference
1	October 8, 2008	Citigroup Global	Business Process Outsourcing	India	US$ 505 mn	12472	Catapulted TCS to number 2 BPO player in India after Genpact
2	November, 2006	TKS-Teknosoft	Banking Product	Switzerland	US$ 80.4	115	Expand product portfolio by getting rights to Quartz and ownership of Alpha and e-portfolio, Presence in Switzerland and France
3	November, 2005	Comicrom	Banking BPO	Chile	US$ 23.7 mn	1257	Entry into Latin America; Access to payment processing platform
4	February, 2006	Tata Infotech	IT Services	India	-	-	-
5	October, 2005	FNS	Core Banking Product	Australia	US$ 26 mn	190	To fill the core banking solution gap in its BFSI vertical; Got access to 116 customers in 35 countries; FNS was an existing partner for TCS
6	October, 2005	Pearl Group	Insurance	UK	US$ 94.7 mn	950	Acquired life and pension outsourcing business from Pearl Group
7	November 2006	TCS Management	IT Services	Australia	US$ 13.0 mn	35	Access to Australian clients
8	May 2004	Phoenix Global Solutions	BPO	India	US$ 13 mn	350	Acquire expertise in insurance
9	May 2005	Swedish Indian IT Resources AB (SITAR)	IT Services	Sweden	US$ 4.8 mn	-	Acquire blue-chip European customers like Ericsson, IKEA, Vattenfall and Hutchison; SITAR was TCS’ exclusive partner in Sweden and a non-exclusive partner in Norway.
10	May 2004	Aviation Software Development Consultancy India (ASDC)	BPO	India	-	180	ASDC was a Singapore Airlines-TCS JV; Got Singapore Airlines as a major client
11	January 2004	Airline Financial Support Services India (AFS)	BPO	India	US$ 5.1 mn	316	BPO expertise in Airline and Hospitality sector
12	October 2001	CMC	IT Services	India	US$33.8m (51%)	3100	Access to domestic capability

TCS Innovation Labs

TCS has research and development labs spanning across 5 countries for research and development of new domain solutions. Most of the labs are located in India.

• TCS Innovation Lab, Convergence: Works on Content Management Systems, content delivery systems, convergence engines, networks such as 3G, WiMax, WiMesh, IP Testing for Quality of Service, IMS, OSS/BSS systems, and others.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Delhi: Works on emerging technologies such as Software Architectures, Software as a Service, natural language processing, text, data and process analytics, multimedia applications and graphics.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Embedded Systems: Focuses on medical electronics, WiMAX, and WLAN technologies.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Hyderabad: Focuses on computational methods in life sciences, meta-genomics, systems biology, e-security, smart card-based applications, digital media protection, nano-biotechnology, quantitative finance.
• TCS Innovation Lab: Media and Entertainment: Located in Burbank, California, this lab works on digital media distribution, digital asset management, theatrical distribution systems, contracts and rights management systems, ERP, data warehousing and application maintenance outsourcing
• TCS Innovation Lab, Mumbai: Focuses on speech and natural language processing, wireless systems and wireless applications.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Insurance - Chennai: Focuses on applying latest and appropriate technology solutions and Innovating process models for Insurance Business.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Chennai: Works on infrastructure innovation, green computing, Web 2.0 and next-generation user interfaces.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Peterborough, England: Focuses on new-wave communications for the enterprise such as browser based Web 2.0 technologies, utility computing and RFID (chips, tags, labels, readers and middleware).
• TCS Innovation Lab: TRDDC (Tata Research Development and Design Centre), Pune
• TCS Innovation Lab: Performance Engineering, Mumbai: The Performance Engineering Innovation Lab was set up in August 2006 with the mission of creating assets to automate performance within TCS delivery, and deliver high performance technology components as part of TCS solutions and products. Some of the assets released by this innovation lab are DBProdem, Jensor , Wanem , Scrutinet.

Tata Research Development and Design Centre

The Tata Research Development and Design Centre, part of the TCS Innovation Labs network, was established in 1981 in Pune. It concerns itself with R&D in software engineering and process engineering.

Research and development work at TRDDC is focused in different groups, each specializing in a key area of work. Projects of an interdisciplinary nature are also carried out. TRDDC provides solutions within TCS and for major clients. There is also an ongoing effort to integrate its products into the Eclipse Integration Framework.

The process engineering group of TRDDC focuses on modeling and optimization of industrial unit operations for steel and automotive sector.

In addition, TRDDC is also involved in the areas of language processing, formal methods, and research on artificial intelligence and decision support.

In January 2007, TRDDC celebrated its silver jubilee at its headquarters in Pune. The Chief Guest was former president Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam .

Expansion

The company continues to grow in multiple geographies such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and China (TATA Information Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd.), with a special focus on the North American and European markets.

Work for the Indian Government

In an effort to improve passport services in India, the government has signed a contract with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Monday (October 13'08) for starting the Passport Seva project, which is aimed at automating and expediting the delivery of passports in India.

The contract was signed almost three months after the Ministry issued the letter of intent to TCS on July 23, for the project, estimated to be worth Rs 10-15 billion. A public-private initiative, the Passport Seva project began as one of the 27 mission mode projects listed in the national e-governance plan.

TCS launched a mission-mode e-governance project, MCA-21, for the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India, and has created an automated solution for the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme that reduces waste and corruption.

TCS is a part of National Skills Registry (NSR), a centralized database of all employees of the IT services and BPO companies in India. The objective of NSR is to improve recruitment practices in IT and BPO industry, which will in turn help in maintaining India's global competitive advantage.

TCS has designed a new software to help the National Literacy Mission in its goal of eradicating illiteracy in India. The software is geared towards letting illiterate adults learn to read a language by words instead of alphabets and turn them into functional literates who can at least read simple newspaper headlines, signboards, directions etc.

Global presence

TCS has set up nearshore centres in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, regional development centres in Hungary, Uruguay and Brazil and a global development centre in China, in addition to India.

In 2006, Tata acquired Chile's Comicrom S.A., Australia's Financial Network Services (Holdings) Pty Ltd, (FNS) and Sweden's Indian IT Resources AB (SITAR) through subsidiaries.

The Company has set up two subsidiaries, viz. TCS FNS Pty Limited in Australia and Diligenta Limited in the UK. It has also set up other subsidiaries such as Portugal Unipessoal Limitada in Portugal, Tata Consultancy Services Luxembourg S.A. in Luxembourg and Tata Consultancy Service Chile Limited in Chile. The Company has 49 subsidiaries as on March 31, 2006.

In March 2006, the Company, through its subsidiary Diligenta Limited acquired, on a going concern basis certain businesses of Pearl Group Services Limited. The acquisition included specified insurance contracts and claim administration business and assets including goodwill and know-how.

The Company has entered into a joint venture agreement with the Intelenet Global Services Ltd. For the GM deal, TCS is tying up with EDS to bid for parts of the business.

In February, 2007, TCS kicked off a joint venture in China with Microsoft and three Chinese entities - TATA Information Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd..

Tata Consultancy Services has a branch in Japan, which is located on several floors in the Queen's Tower A high-rise building in Minatomirai (Yokohama). This location is the only office in Japan, and does embedded research, as well as ERP and other consulting.

On October 8, 2008, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading IT services, business solutions and outsourcing firm, and Citigroup Inc., a leading global financial services company, today announced that they have reached an agreement for TCS to acquire all of Citi's interest in Citigroup Global Services Limited (CGSL), the India-based captive business processing outsourcing (BPO) arm of Citi for all cash consideration of approximately $505 million, subject to closing adjustments. In addition to the sale, Citi has signed an agreement for TCS to provide, through CGSL, process outsourcing services to Citi and its affiliates in an aggregate amount of US$2.5 billion over a period of 9.5 years. The agreement builds upon the existing relationship between Citi and TCS whereby TCS provides application development, infrastructure support, help desk and other process outsourcing services to Citi.

Layoffs

In 2008, due to growing concerns about a strengthening rupee and an impending recession, TCS cut performance-linked pay for its employees, and asked 500 of its employees to leave after poor performance appraisals.

Recently TCS has also put hold on all the promotions of it employees citing economic uncertainty as the main reason.

External links

• Tata Consultancy Services website
• TCS Certifying Authority
• TCS Innovations Blog
• TCS Advanced Technology Center (ATC)
• TCS in Tata Group
• TCS Alumni Network on LinkedIn
• Capitaline
• Interview with S.Ramadorai
• TCS Ltd. : The Pioneer in Indian IT Industry
• Brand Recall: The next big IT Challenge