Large IT/ITES deals in India: winning and customer management in large deals

Abstract

The Indian IT/ITES industry has grown phenomenally over the last couple of decades and has been successful in competing globally with some of the global top IT/ITES companies to win outsourcing deals from all the big multinationals of the world. Many of these multinationals initially resorted to outsourcing only to benefit from the significant opportunities of cost and labor arbitrage from the Indian IT players. But as the industry matured, these companies realized that Indian firms were actually capable of offering much more than just cost arbitrage and hence they started depending on these companies to manage their entire IT systems and processes, including people. The Indian firms, at the same time, had to rise to the challenge and they did so by convincingly winning and immaculately executing increasingly bigger IT deals. The 186K (Lattice Group) deal of Wipro was one of the earliest of such large deals. Global competitors did not accept this lying down and companies like IBM rose to the challenge by clinching billion dollar deals from Indian firms like Airtel. As the Indian companies started gaining more and more confidence in the large deal space, they took the competition to the next higher level by starting to acquire entire IT services of multinationals (e.g. Pearl deal of TCS and Citigroup deals of both TCS and Wipro).Winning large deals is not a simple affair and it takes an altogether different set of skills for a vendor to both build the competency and then develop the strategies as they pitch for large deals. There are issues related to team building and management focus, handling and eventually defeating the competitors, effectively responding to the customer s RFP and a whole set of communication issues both within the vendor team as well as with the customer. Finally, managing the customer is an art in itself and if not done properly can significantly affect the prospects in a company s attempt to win a large deal.