Indian major HCL Technologies has announced a significant hosting and collaboration win with AstraZeneca. The deal comes after months of rumour suggesting that the pharma giant was seeking to extricate itself from the $1.4bn, 7-year contract it signed with IBM in 2007.
This major new deal for HCL covers data global centre management and migration, as well as email, messaging and collaboration. There’s no contract value being cited yet, but somewhere in the several tens of millions of dollars per year as a minimum looks likely. But beyond its financial value this appears to be one of those contacts with a healthy amount of marketing potential, given the high profile of the client, the scope of the services covered and the apparent steal from a major incumbent. We look forward to hearing more from senior folks at HCL’s Infrastructure Services Division when we meet up early in the new year.
A number of other competitors are also being named in the Indian press as beneficiaries of new business from AstraZeneca. But so far there’s no confirmation from anyone bar HCL, so we will have to wait and see. It wouldn’t be that surprising, however, if AstraZeneca had chosen to split a fairly monolithic ITO set-up into smaller chunks. A reduction in time-span and overall spend would also be very much in keeping with the times.