Indian IT firms fuel Qantas flight

Satyam Computer Services Ltd and Tata Consultancy Services today announced in separate statements that they have won multi-million seven-year contracts with Qantas.

The agreement between Satyam and Qantas covers application development and maintenance services for over 150 applications across a wide portfolio of technologies.
This follows the recent Oracle e-Business suite contract announced in August between Qantas and Satyam for the implemented elements of Qantas’ eBusiness systems. The transition of the IT support and service delivery of these applications to Satyam is already underway, the Satyam statement said.
The deal follows an extensive, 12-month review by Qantas of its information technology applications development, support and maintenance functions.
Commenting on this win, Rama Raju, co-founder and chief executive officer of Satyam, said, “We are very proud to partner with Qantas, Australia’s leading airline as one of their global service providers and we look forward to leveraging our global expertise towards achieving Qantas goals and objectives.”
TCS’ seven-year engagement with Qantas with an expected value of around AUD120 million (US$90 million) is to provide a range of IT application, transformation and maintenance services.
Under the contract, TCS will assume full responsibility for more than 75 per cent of the total scope of Qantas' (AST) program. TCS will provide support and maintenance to all of Qantas' key IT applications for airport operations and commercial systems TCS will be the lead partner for the transition phase of the entire Qantas AST program, overseeing activities of many of Qantas' internal and external groups involved in IT systems support and maintenance.

"The Qantas engagement is a significant milestone for TCS' airline business and is the result of our extensive investments in building domain expertise that has helped create innovative solutions for companies," said S Ramadorai, CEO and managing director. "We believe technology has a strong role to play in enabling the travel and hospitality sector companies to retain customers and build new business models," he added.

The TCS statement issued from Sydney said that Qantas will benefit from access to TCS' new Innovation Lab for Travel and Hospitality, located in Chennai. The Lab incubates, develops and pilots new solutions for emerging technologies such as RFID, wireless and digital asset management.