TCS bids for pound 2.3 bn UK contract

Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest unlisted information technology services company, has made it to the shortlist for the selection of five local service providers for UK's National Health Services' £2.3 billion IT revamp programme.

The National Programme for IT in the NHS had called for tenders from national and international IT companies for the role of Local Service Providers and National Application Service Providers for the programme.

The programme was launched by the Department of Health in June 2002 with the publication of 'Delivering 21st Century IT Support for the NHS'. The budget of £2.3 billion is spread over the next three years and is central to plans to modernise the health service in UK.

"The NHS is a huge organisation with over a million employees. Over the years it has inherited all sorts of different systems. Now it wants someone who can integrate those varied systems," says Phil Codding, analyst with Ovum, the largest analyst firm based in Europe that covers telecom and technology sectors.

Tata Consultancy Services is bidding for the project as part of two consortiums. The first is the Cerner Corporation/SchlumbergerSema/Serco/TCS Consortium and the second is the Fujitsu Services Limited/PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP/TCS Consortium.

TCS' share -- if it wins -- will be at least £10 million spread over the next few years.  But this is just a ballpark, caution analyst, since the size of TCS' share in the contract is not yet clear.

TCS is already the largest Indian company in the UK with revenues of over £100 million a year.

The NHS had said five LSPs would be appointed to cover separate geographical regions of England. Their task would to be to co-ordinate the implementation of the National Programme's four technological pillars of electronic appointment booking, electronic transfer of prescriptions, modernised IT infrastructure and an electronic Integrated Care Record Service. 

Two National Application Service Providers would also be appointed.

In April, a shortlist of 31 candidates was announced. Of this, 27 candidates had qualified for further consideration for the role of LSP and 20 for the role of NASP. The shortlist was derived from a total of 99 expressions of interest.

In this shortlist, other Indian companies like Wipro and Patni too had been featured but they did not make it to the final list.

For the role of the NASP, the choice is now down to BT, IBM and Lockheed. For the LSP contracts the consortium featuring TCS is among the three shortlisted.

The contracts are expected to be awarded by the end of the year.