IBM, IIFL in Rs 298-cr outsourcing deal

IT giant, International Business Machines (IBM), today said it has entered into a Rs 298-crore outsourcing agreement with India Infoline (IIFL) to transform its IT infrastructure and establish a direct linkage between business performance and IT costs.

Under the 10-year agreement, IBM will take over the complete IT operations of IIFL which will entail managing more than 700 IIFL branches pan-India, the company said in a statement.

The world's largest technology services firm will take over the entire application support for the custom built application stack, based on an innovative co-managed support model with IIFL's application team.

IBM will set-up a centralised helpdesk, roll-out a pan-India deskside services capability to support users, applications and infrastructure in branches and deploy service management processes to cover assets, IT security, capacity, network, storage, incident and technology, among others.

IBM will help IIFL in mitigating IT operational risks by reducing people dependency on operations, eliminating points of failure and by extending business value of existing applications, it said.

"With our unparalleled domain expertise and technology competence, we are uniquely positioned to build a reliable and robust IT model to realise IIFL's infrastructure transformation objectives," IBM's India/South Asia, Director (Sales, strategic outsourcing) Global Technology Services, Karthik Shivram, said.

The agreement will help IIFL deliver a higher level of customer satisfaction, ensure continuous audit readiness, strengthen its IT security framework and compliance while at the same time provide better visibility and control of IT operations.

"IBM came up with an innovative commercial model that will provide a direct connection between business performance and IT costs, while enabling us to scale operations at short notices," IIFL Group's Chief Technology Officer, Sankarson Banerjee, said.