The Reader’s Digest Association (RDA), a global media and marketing company and the publisher of 92 magazines, including 50 editions of Reader’s Digest, has awarded $350 million end-to-end IT Outsourcing (ITO) deal to HCL Technologies, an India-based outsourcing service provider. In terms of its scope. the seven-year ITO deal is the biggest outsourcing agreement inked in India in Q1'09.
“We congratulate HCL for this landmark engagement. The Indian IT-BPO industry is increasingly focused on expanding into less penetrated verticals through innovative business models. This deal reinforces the fact how global sourcing helps economies to take advantage of talent, new opportunities which will help revive the current economic situation,” said Som Mittal, President Nasscom (India's National Association of Software and Services Companies).
While stating their the expectations from the deal, Al Perruzza, Senior Vice President for Global Operations, IT and Business Redesign for RDA said, “This engagement will bring in cost reductions, process efficiencies and improvement in service levels which will enhance the role IT plays as an enabler to our core business. As a global company with offices in 45 countries and serving customers in 79 countries, Reader's Digest finds it imperative to have an IT partner that has both scale and state-of-the-art capabilities. HCL has demonstrated repeatedly that it operates with remarkable success and consistency working with companies posing such global challenges.”
Under the terms of the global outsourcing deal, “HCL has virtually taken over the complete IT Department of RDA; providing support on an unprecedented scale across 45 countries and 14 languages [Portuguese, French, Russian, Czech, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Romanian, Slovak and Turkish] across North America, Latin America, East and West Europe and Asia,” said R. Srikrishna, Senior Vice President, North America, HCLT ISD. “Further, the engagement has a true ‘global delivery’ flavor, which will be enabled through an Integrated Helpdesk in 14 global languages. These will be supported across 45 countries through HCL’s global delivery locations in Poland, US and India supported by a worldwide onsite support network. HCL will also re-badge a number of RDA employees on its rolls,” he added.
In addition, HCL will take over RDA's existing IT contracts and will manage them over the engagement period. As per the first Integrated IT-services deal in the media, publishing and entertainment entrusted to an Indian service provider, HCL will also be responsible for application development across the stack of Oracle Universe, Open Technologies and Mainframe; and infrastructure support for network, security, storage, end-user computing and data centers including disaster recovery services. The scope also includes data center and application portfolio optimization to consolidate applications globally and refresh of legacy assets to modernize RDA’s IT environment.
On the future of the outsourcing relationship with HCL, RDA's Perruzza added “We look forward to a long relationship of mutual trust with them.”
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