17th Sept, 2009 – HCL Technologies Ltd. (HCL), a leading global IT services provider, entered into a five year Transformational IT Infrastructure Management engagement with Oncor to seamlessly connect and support Oncor corporate functions, grid management operations and numerous community- based field service centers located throughout Oncor’s service area.

Oncor operates the largest electric distribution and transmission system in Texas, delivering power to more than 3 million homes and businesses through approximately 117,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines. “With this new contract, HCL will be investing in both the utilities sector and in Texas, through the development of a worldwide Utilities Center of Expertise in Dallas.

The Center will research and develop technologies to help transform the way energy is generated, marketed and delivered to customers around the world, which fits Oncor’s leadership in advanced Smart Grid technology deployment,” said R Srikrishna, Senior Vice President and Head – Global Sales, HCL Infrastructure Services Division (HCL ISD).

HCL’s scope of work (SoW) will cover end user computing (service desk, desk-side services) for approximately 3,600 employees; datacenter and network Services, business continuity /disaster recovery and consulting services supporting Oncor’s IT infrastructure architecture and platform modernization projects. “Our client services delivery model utilizes local personnel for on-site support, which contributes to local job base stability,” said Todd Crandall, Senior Vice President and Global Head, Energy and Utilities Sector, HCL Axon. “This engagement clearly underlines our commitment and dedicated focus in Texas.”

Now this is interesting they are also utilizing local personnel and following the govt. guidelines as the part of Obama’s initiative to save jobs and reducing the loss of jobs due to off-shoring – great going. I believe it is necessary – Everything can’t be remote!

Multi-million Dollar Contract, spread across 5 Years, encompassing desktop support across 76 countries in 13 languages. HCL says it has bagged the deal among competition from Global as well as Indian players.

The Scope of the contract -

• global account management,
• workstation packaging,
• creation and maintenance,
• workstation security management and
• On site support services

HCL plans to offer a variety of new features for Nokia’s staff including a chat facility that will allow users to get support quickly without having to open a service ticket, and a self-service portal with service information, said Pradeep Bindal, senior vice president for Europe of HCL Technologies’ Infrastructure Service Division.

HCL has opened up a new near-shore center in Helsinki, Finland to support Nokia. HCL through its subsidiary – Infrastructure Service Division (ISD) is setting up a 100-person support center in Finland for Nokia and other customer in nordic countries.

The deal has been considered as the biggest infrastructure deal, however Mr. Bindal says the margins are lower in such deals are lower. Generally Infrastructure deals involve taking over the assets (Data centers and workstations) and the prices are part of the deal. However the HCL-Nokia deal is  a pure service deal. Mr. Bindal says the billing would be done on

• Number of Help Desk requests received
• Number of workstations being supported

HCL Facts revealed by Mr. Bindal

• HCL currently manages over 650,000 desktops under its remote infrastructure management program.
• HCL already has capabilities in-house in 12 of the 13 languages in which it will be offering support to Nokia.

6,500 Consumers surveyed from 13 countries -

• Finland, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA, Nigeria, India, China, Indonesia and Brazil

If each of the three billion people globally owning mobiles brought back just one unused device we could save 240,000 tonnes of raw materials and reduce greenhouse gases to the same effect as taking 4 million cars off the road. By working together, small individual actions could add up to make a big difference.

– Markus Terho, Director of Environmental Affairs, Markets, at Nokia

% of People aware of Mobile phone recycling

One of the statics that highlighted the survey was awareness of people in India about recycling which scored lowest in the Global Ranking. The most interesting fact the survey brought out to the world was about what people do with their old handsets, highlights -

• Only 3% of the users globally recycled their handset,
• 4% of them were thrown
• (Majority) 44% of them were kept at home, coming to no use at all.
• While rest of the 16% of them being sold in emerging markets.

% of What people do with their handsets

Nokia in response to this, has launched Take-Back Campaigns in India. Nokia has been running such campaigns from late 1990′s in other parts of the world. Nokia has formed alliances with Environmental protection & preservation agencies like WWF & StEP. With the launch of Take-Back Campaigns in India, Nokia aims at improving awareness about recycling. Moreover Nokia in a statement mentioned -

..company will be planting a tree for every handset dropped into these recycling bins and giving out a surprise gift as well,

Well, I think it would be really interesting to watch Nokia plant trees, but the scenario I’m looking into is Where? and planting is good ..but the question who is going to maintain it? Well, I personally have affinity for the organizations that are into social development and humanizing things rather than monetizing every damn thing! I love the concept Nokia has come up, and I believe it to be the first co. marketing the human effort.

Nokia’s Take-Back Campaign is NOT LIMITED to Nokia handsets only, its available to all the mobile phones. So if you have a mobile phone kept in your junk yard or drawer, please.. please take it out go to your nearest Nokia Care Center and give it for recycle.

CONTRiBUTE TO ENViRONMENT

Developer of the first ever QUAKE III Arena port is Olli Hinkka who is also the developer of some of the best previous QUAKE ports for Symbian phones. This time he decided to enable a full Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support to achieve a better gameplay, which is otherwise unreachable due to the rather uncomfortable phone controls.

There’s also a possibility to run a game server on the mobile phone to enable multiplayer gaming.

Compatible with the QUAKE III Arena port are the S60 3rd Edition phones powered by a TI OMAP 2420 processor. Those include the Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N82 and Nokia E90. Despite having the same chipset, the now elderly Nokia N95 isn’t among the compatible models as it has less RAM than the N95 8GB (half the amount, actually).

Ok, Ranger, go draw some blood – QUAKE 3 style!