Tata Wins A Whopper: $1.2 Billion Outsourcing Deal With NielsenTata Wins A Whopper: $1.2 Billion Outsourcing Deal With Nielsen

Tata Consultancy Services on Thursday announced a 10-year, $1.2 billion contract with Nielsen Co. for a wide range of services that span from IT infrastructure management to business processes to managing important knowledge-based processes. It's believed to be the largest deal ever awarded to an India-based services provider.

Most billion-dollar outsourcing deals go to what's typically known as the global six: Accenture, ACS, CSC, EDS, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. Yet the TCS deal, and a five-year, $1 billion deal inked late last year between British Telecom and Tech Mahindra for tech support, are evidence that Indian firms are successfully growing the size of their contracts.

TCS will manage a substantial chunk of IT and operations for Netherlands-based Nielsen, known for its consumer and media information services. In the area of infrastructure management, TCS will integrate and centralize Nielsen's systems, technologies, and processes worldwide, and also will handle certain finance and human-resource functions. Those functions will run on IT systems built by TCS.

TCS also is using the deal to highlight an emerging area it calls "knowledge process outsourcing," or KPO. TCS will manage an India-based Nielsen team with expertise in information-management processes for Nielsen's retail measurement services, which it sells to consumer goods manufacturers and retailers. TCS sees the addition of the Nielsen team helping to accelerate its own efforts to sell KPO services such as analytics and reporting and data management.

The deal is part of a big business transformation going on at Nielsen. "Nielsen is moving quickly to transform an outstanding group of operating businesses into an integrated, market-focused organization that delivers high-value information services to our clients," said Mitchell Habib, executive VP in charge of Nielsen Global Business Services, in a statement.

"This arrangement with TCS will help us streamline and simplify our IT infrastructure, application platforms, and operational practices across our businesses, support the development of integrated solutions, and give us much greater flexibility to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace."