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.

• Storage Support – Tivoli, EMC, etc.
• Operating System support – Linux/Unix, Windows
• Application Servers Support – IIS, Apache, Tomcat, WebSphere, Glassfish, JBoss
• Database Support – Oracle, MySQL, MS-SQL Server,etc.
• ERP Support – SAP Basis Support
• e-Mail Server Support – send mail, MS-Exchange, etc.
• End-User Support – Identity Management, Active Directory, LDAP, etc.

According to top Research firms, RIMS has a lot to contribute to the countries economy. It is estimated that RIM Services can help organizations save 60% of the costs that they are incurring NOW!

• NASSCOM – Out of India RIMS Business is $ 200-300 Million.
• RIMS Business potential estimated by TOP Research firms -
  • NASSCOM:  $ 150 Billion
  • Forrestor: $ 111 Billion
  • Gartner: $ 80 Billion

There’s a very good small presentational PDF Document published by HCL on NASSCOM Website is available for reading. You can download it from NASSCOM’s Website (or Download Directly from DT: Remote Infrastructure Management Overview – HCL).

Maples ESM, a Global IT Infrastructure Co. has already come up with a course offering in RIM, Networking, UNiX Support, SOA/Middleware Training and Mainframe Training. One of the reason of Co. doing so is McKinsey India report which says that RIMS alone would create 3.25 to 3.75 Lakh job opportunities by the year 2013 capturing $ 13-15 billion worth of share. Adding to this the best of all the features is RIMS is being considered recession proof as what VM Kumar COO, Maples ESM. He say’s …

In times of slowdown in the US, it does make sense for companies to outsource the management of existing IT infrastructure rather than pay a local engineer $16,000 as salary to do it, That way, this sector is recession proof for India as companies can postpone application development to save costs but will have to manage their IT infrastructure, which can be done less expensively by outsourcing