HCL bags Rs 910 cr deal from Skandia UK

HCL Technologies on Wednesday announced a Rs 910 crore ($200 million), multi-service, five-year contract with Skandia UK, taking its cumulative order position in this calendar year to over $600 million (around Rs 2,730 crore).

As part of the deal, Skandia UK - a leading independent provider of long-term savings solutions - will outsource application optimisation, including development, maintenance and support (across all platforms) and remote infrastructure management to HCL.

Skandia UK will retain all customer-facing activities. HCL's new businesses now account for 17 per cent of its total revenue (industry standard is around 8 per cent).

Vineet Nayar, president, HCL, said: "This deal is the latest in a series of large-scale wins for us. Like DSG International ($330 million), Autodesk and Teradyne, this contract with Skandia UK is part of our 'Blue Ocean' strategy, which has helped us deliver value rather than volume and concentrate on customer relationships. We are not concentrating on full time equivalent employee rates but on output-based pricing and this deal is a reflection of that strategy."

HCL will enable and accelerate Skandia UK's move to a Service Oriented Architecture as part of an initiative to make Skandia UK's IT landscape a world class, agile infrastructure that will make the savings provider more competitive.

The new architecture will deliver productivity improvements and gains guided by an extensive service level agreement.