Ongc Plans Massive It Drive

The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) is planning to hit the market with what could be a mammoth order for domestic IT companies, which are currently witnessing a slowdown in fortunes.

The corporation is planning to embark on an IT drive just ahead of the impending deregulation of the petroleum sector.

Subir Raha, chairman and managing director of the company, while hinting that the size of its IT requirements could be next only to that of the defence sector and the Railways, said, "Our business is knowledge dependent. We therefore need in place good IT systems to process the available data on exploration. All I can say at this stage is that if we decide to give the order to a domestic IT company, it could be among their biggest."

Raha added that the corporation's board, which is meeting tomorrow in New Delhi to announce the half-yearly results, will take a decision on the issue. He, however, declined to put a figure to the size of the order being considered.

Analysts said the company, which has several assets of different sizes and varying complexities across India, has to work on several hundred gigabytes of data, and hence, would require high quality IT systems to process them.