iGate had a couple of wins in mortgage, one in security, fund administration, reconciliation, in equity research work. Post acquisition of Comicron, TCS bagged a deal with the Bank of Santander, the biggest bank in South America.

TCS brands its integrated approach 'Six Bubble' and this includes IT service, BPO, IMS, products, engineering service and consulting. A common go-to-market would mean that specialists from all the six service lines go together to pitch, saving the client from worrying about buying multiple services.

Infosys did something similar when it restructured its accounts teams to have one person responsible for a relationship, called the engagement manager. Under him or her are people from different service lines. Cognizant too has an integrated go-to-market and delivery strategy. Its high-end BPO practice is embedded within other industry practices such as pharmaceutical, healthcare, financial services, insurance and banking because it helps the company deliver an integrated value to customers, leveraging the synergies across the three pillars of domain, technology and process. Having multiple entities to provide value to the same customer, perhaps, leads to channel conflicts, thereby diluting both the customer experience and the organizational brand equity.

While the 'integrated experience' came in vogue in FY 2005-06, some companies such as HCL and iGate were the early birds. HCL sold the combined proposition of infrastructure management, BPO and IT as early as 2002. Now, it is integrating its consulting offering with the troika. Many of its peers were latecomers in both BPO (HCL started it in 2001) and IMS (HCL Comnet started IMS 12 years ago)-a reason why they never got to integrate sales offerings before. That opportunity has now been grabbed.

TOS vs Best of Breed
The end-to-end branding, on the face of it, seems to contradict with a second strong trend of best of breed outsourcing, wherein large enterprises, while looking at increasing the share of the overall outsourcing pie, are also inclined to de-risk its model and provide work to multiple vendors. The complete solutions provider image, though, shouldn't be confused with total outsourcing, which is what is falling into some disfavor in the exports market.

In the old model of total outsourcing (TOS), an enterprise handed over control of its entire IT establishment to one vendor, sold its hardware, its network, and transferred its entire people. These contracts, often, became so rigid that it couldn't move with the times. Technology being too important to abdicate, enterprises now prefer to keep the strategic control to itself-the architecture, the alignment with business, the governance model, the quality, the program and project management-he would outsource specific things like the network, the data center, the ADM work to different vendors but manage all these relationships on its own.

So when vendors say end-to-end, it means service in reengineering the way one does customer acquisitions, starting with consulting, changing the processes, implementing technologies, supporting transactions. This is more solution end-to-end, rather than total outsourcing.

The End of Monolith Contract
FY 2005-06 had everybody realizing that the days of one-vendor contracts are almost over. When nearly $100 bn worth of contracts comes up for renewal in FY 2006-07, a lot of these single-vendor mega deals are expected to be re-looked at, as enterprises increasingly demand alignment of vendors' interests with their own. Banks, more than anybody else, are bringing in the best of breed players for different requirements because the total spent here can run into multi-billion dollars and has to be de-risked. ABN Amro, in what was perhaps the first deal to be broken down into the components of IT infrastructure, application support and development, divided its $2.2 bn spend amongst IBM, TCS, Infosys, Patni and Accenture. IBM took away the IT infrastructure services part and assumed management of the bank's information technology systems, including servers, storage systems and desktops, almost 80% of the deal size. The other players walked away with apps support and the development part. The deal was a landmark for Indian offshore companies as instead of being sub-contracted by any giant multinational IT services firm, it was awarded directly at the source by the bank, indicative of the maturity they have accomplished.

A large bank in Canada got into the mode next. It was working with IBM, Infy and Satyam for several years. Last year, i-Gate was brought into the fold as a strategic partner for IT, BPO and consulting work.

GE did $ 600 mn in India last year and has around $250 mn of that locked up with TCS. This is reportedly giving them sleepless nights and efforts are on to downsize that. For TCS, it is big money. For GE, giving away over 40% to one vendor is uncomfortable.

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