BANGALORE: Tech biggies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL are all set to get'09
new outsourcing contracts worth $4 billion from top customers including British
Telecom, Citi, GE and Bank of America this year. In a bid to cope with their tightened budgets, these companies plan to send their information technology works to offshore locations such as India.

Among some of the top deals coming to India, $250-million outsourcing contract being considered by Australian phone firm Telstra is expected to be finalised by the end of January, followed by several contracts worth between $50 and $100 million from Citi, BT, GE and other customers.

Outsourcing expert Sabyasachi S Sathyaparasad of Mindplex Consulting said that the new deals will include long-term application maintenance contracts. However, even as these customers seek to award new projects by renewing existing contracts, Indian vendors may lose over $300 million because of lower billing rates.

“Many large customers have reduced their IT budgets by up to 10%, and they plan to seek more cost and business output-based deliverables from service providers in these difficult times,” he said.

Telstra plans to reduce the number of vendors it works with in order to have one supplier for each domain across the product lines for bringing down the cost of managing IT systems. “The company wants to move more than half of this contract to an offshore location such as India, and that is why pure Indian offshore vendors including Infosys, Satyam and EDS-Mphasis are being seriously considered,” said a senior executive at one of the top tech firms bidding for the Telstra contract. He requested anonymity.