The contract starts from April 1, 2007 and will be completed in phases.

The pact with IBM will enable Idea to meet the needs of its 14 million current subscribers and future growth. This will be through supporting end-to-end transformation of business critical process including billing, revenue assurance and credit collection, business intelligence, fraud management, e-billing and payment and customer self care.

Of the 200 IT professionals at Idea, about 20% will continue to work as the core IT team whereas the rest will move over to IBM. The IT major plans to move Idea’s IT systems to service oriented architecture (SOA) platform. The transition should start six months from the contract period.

Sanjeev Aga, managing director, Idea Cellular said, "IT is core to our business and we were looking at a partner that will have processes and systems that address scale and technology innovation." He added, though, that the IT strategy will be driven by Idea. The partnership will allow Idea to accelerate time-to-market of new services, offer voice, data, video and wireless technologies, and add new revenue streams among other benefits.

Shanker Annaswamy, managing director, (IBM India and South Asia) said: "IBM will bring its deep global expertise in business transformation and innovation to enable Idea to meet with its customer value, business growth and productivity objectives."

For IBM this its second win in the Indian Telecom segment. Bharti has signed a $750 million deal for equipment and network-management service with IBM in 2004 for a period of 10 years. Without giving any specific numbers Annaswamy said that telcom contributes substantially to IBM's revenue globally. Vodafone and Telstra are some of its global customers.

Source: Business Standard