Nielsen in Ten-Year Outsourcing Deal

Nielsen has announced a massive, ten-year outsourcing deal with India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The research giant's IT, operations and HR functions worldwide are among those covered by the $US 1.2 billion agreement.

TCS says it will 'assume responsibility for important IT and operational processes and help Nielsen integrate and centralise multiple systems, technologies and processes on a global scale' - as well as taking on certain finance and human resource business processes, using new BPO platforms.

The deal is no great surprise to those familiar with the career of Nielsen's Executive VP in charge of Global Business Services, Mitchell Habib, appointed in March this year (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6524.htm ). While at Citigroup and General Electric, Habib was involved in large scale outsourcing activities. On the latest deal, he comments: 'Nielsen is moving quickly to transform an outstanding group of operating businesses into an integrated, market-focused organisation that delivers high-value information services to our clients. This arrangement with TCS will help us streamline and simplify our IT infrastructure and 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.'

TCS's COO and Executive Director N Chandrasekaran, says the 'landmark agreement... combines our traditional strength in IT services with our growing prowess in areas like infrastructure and enterprise transformation, consulting, and platform-based BPO.' He adds: 'We will create a single platform to combine multiple operations relating to finance and accounts. We will also do the same for Nielsen's human resources. We will manage their information technology infrastructure and also offer consulting services such as helping out with analytics.'

The firms say Nielsen's clients will also benefit, with TCS technology promising 'faster and enriched information service delivery' and helping in the set-up of an innovation lab to help it conceptualise the next generation of business solutions.

As part of the agreement, TCS said it will take direct responsibility for a Nielsen team based in Baroda, Gujarat, working on key information-management processes for Nielsen's retail measurement services. In doing so, TCS will bolster its own established knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) team and accelerate its development, making it one of the largest KPO providers in India. It already works in such areas as analytics and reporting and reference data management.

The deal is said to be the first single outsourcing contract in excess of $1 billion for India - more than a third larger than the $847m contract TCS won recently from UK-based financial group Pearl. However, in comments to The Associated Press, Chandrasekaran indicated that Tata would not rest on its laurels: 'We need more such deals. If it becomes a one-off thing, that's not going to help.'

The Nielsen Company is online at www.nielsen.com and its new partner at www.tata.com.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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