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Media Reports
From being a laggard in IT, having incurred losses and downsized people, Tata Infotech has managed a U-turn. Products, end-to-end solutions and a fair amount of marketing initiatives have not only generated profits, but have driven TIL back in the reckoning, reports Bakul Gala. November has been an eventful month for Tata Infotech Limited (TIL), the beleaguered Mumbai-based Rs 421 crore Information Technology major. A slew of projects and orders gave a fillip to the company's already upbeat morale. Tata Infotech's ERP consultants have returned from Saudi Arabia after completing an ERP project implemented for TAYF, a $ 1 billion plastic product company. Incidentally, the project has been completed one month ahead of schedule. Secondly, the country's biggest oil company, Indian Oil Corporation has engaged TIL to implement its IT plan to connect state-wide offices and its head office in Mumbai. Says Dr Nirmal Jain, Managing Director, "Tata Infotech is getting new orders on a regular basis nowadays, Q2 was good, when we saw order books grow rapidly and profits move firmly into the black. By the year end I expect we will be smiling again." In the US, which is an important market for TIL-- contributing half of its revenues-- Shrikant Pathak vice president, claims to have made major inroads."Metlife Insurance, one of the largest insurance companies has bestowed upon us the task of developing XML based solutions for their businesses .Customer relationship management solutions is the hottest of them," says Pathak. According to him, TIL will showcase its XML strength at the US annual XML conference to be held next week. "Code-named XML Mantra, this product is already finding enough takers. Crystal, a subsidiary of Xerox has shown keen interest in this product. XML Mantra is an automated XML conversion software, through which you could convert non-XML data to XML format. It's very useful for the e-books publishers, who can convert their 'word format' files into net ready documents," adds Pathak. Says Jain, "Tata Infotech is also working with the largest insurance company, H2H Insurance, which deals with health insurance for the people on the move. Here Tata Infotech is developing e-biz insurance solutions, especially for students who travel abroad for further studies. More exciting is our on going negotiations with one of the largest retail chains in the US for a solution involving datamining and the development of a customized decision support system. For the retail chain, customer analysis, or more specifically the analysis of customer purchase patterns and how they correlate to the customer profile are important." Though all these orders, when added together will not add up to more than Rs 50 to 75 crore, what is significant is that these orders come from different companies. Tata Infotech which burnt its fingers badly dealing with a single client Unisys, which accounted for 70 percent of its revenues at one time, has learnt the hard way the importance of having a diversified list of current clients. "Today, apart from having a wider client base, the good news is that we are addressing different companies in different sectors like telecos, retail chains, insurance and of course software companies," comments Jain. The telecom company Jain is referring to has asked Tata Infotech Ltd to combine geographic information and decision support systems. It's a component based solution for their call center where they want to delve into the origin of calls, their movement and the load pattern etc. It should be recalled that last year TIL suffered a major setback when it became the only established big league software company in the Indian IT sector to incur a loss. A big chunk of the company's 4300 strong work force was forced into idleness for almost a year. Obviously the morale was down and in the process TIL lost almost 20 percent of its skilled force. "More than 700 people left us, of which some were key professionals. Had they been around, these professionals could have made some difference for the new projects we are handling. Any way, we are in recruitment mode once again with almost 300 new people on board since last year," says Jain. Barring the red blip in its history, which lasted
for a brief spell for 6 months, TIL's balance sheet was historically
healthy. In fact, until last year the company was the darling
of the stock market and was commanding a high price of Rs 1115
a share, which fell to the 52-week low of Rs 182.
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