Idea-IBM ink 10 year Business Transformation Pact

Mumbai, Mar 21: International Business Machines (IBM) and Idea Cellular Ltd. (Idea), a leading Indian GSM mobile services provider and an Aditya Birla Group company, today announced a 10 year business transformation pact to integrate, innovate and transform Idea's business processes and IT infrastructure.

The pact is designed on an innovative risk-reward revenue sharing model. It covers all of Idea's existing operations and potential new additions. The 10 year pact, depending upon Idea's business revenues and circle expansion, would size around 600 million USD to 800 million USD, a press release issued here today said.

Announcing the pact, Mr. Sanjeev Aga, Managing Director, Idea Cellular Ltd said ''Idea is focused on innovation led growth. Our partnership with IBM will bring value to our customers, employees and shareholders. We will harness IBM's power to support Idea's explosive growth with robust, best-in-class solutions that address scalability, complexity, innovation and cost control, to provide Idea with the most advanced business processes globally.'' Shanker Annaswamy, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia said, ''IBM will bring its deep global expertise in business transformation and innovation to enable Idea to meet with its customer value, business growth and productivity objectives. We are delighted to partner with the Aditya Birla group.'' The pact with IBM will enable Idea to meet the needs of its 14 million current subscribers and future growth. This will be through supporting end to end transformation of business critical processes including billing, revenue assurance, and credit collection, subscriber management, business intelligence, fraud management, customer relationship management, e-billing and payment and customer self care.

IBM will also undertake the management and support of Idea's IT Infrastructure. All IT department employees of Idea would play a key role in the transformation, either as Idea employees or as IBM employees.

UNI