Pwc In Recast, Sets Up Technology Practice

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the global audit and consultancy firm, has set up a new technology service practice (TSP) division following restructuring of its information technology systems integration (ITSI) wing as part of a global process.

The TSP restructuring will bring together all lines of businesses that PwC feels are the "businesses of the future under one roof", said R N Roy, head of PwC's consulting business in India.

"TSP will be constantly at the cutting edge of business and will reflect the shift in the market from product focus to process focus," he added.

More than half of TSP's business will come from existing global contracts from clients like the World Bank, Sony, General Motors and Tetrapak. Ambarish Dasgupta has been selected executive director and head of TSP, based at Kolkata.

Technology centres at Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai will work together under the TSP banner. Businesses across more than one practice have been pulled out to form the TSP basket.

Roy said PwC's vision was to use TSP to bring the latest global technology to the Indian workplace.

The division has been conceptualised taking into account predictions made by consultancies like McKinsey on gloabl tech shifts.

A typical example of this was the content factory, which was clearly a business for the future and would increasingly become a technology intensive segment, Dasgupta pointed out.

The restructuring follows a shift in the recent past when PwC's global tax and some other functions were shifted out to its India Development Centre (IDC) at Kolkata and other offices.

TSP would focus on trends identified in PwC's global technology forecast, which has identified mobile computing and business applications as the growth area of the future.

TSP will also be used to market PwC's solution set approach for the telecom sector under the New World Networks (NWN) banner. NWN promises fast implementation and has best practices embedded, said Roy.

Telecom sector billing and other applications were under study and PwC was open to a partnership in the field, said Dasgupta.

In content management tools, PwC's Indian operations has already gained valuable experience handling work for Pantallos, the largest energy marketplace in the US, said Dasgupta.

The umbrella of products for the future under TSP include upgraded version of PwC's 'Em-Power' package for billing and non-billing services in the power sector, which has now been made web-enabled and integrates regulatory norms and data on state electricity boards in India.

A special package for the consumer products sector, which will also be web-enabled, is under development. The product will be branded at a later stage.

In the middleware and back-end segments, products under development or on offer from TSP include web testing lab facilities, enterprise integration applications and CRM applications in partnership with ATG and Broadvision, among others. Work is also underway on backend connectors and adaptors, with products from GE and others being targetted.