Wipro, SBI discuss IT partnership

Amid the global financial turmoil, State Bank of India (SBI) Chairman O P Bhatt had a special visitor in Wipro Chairman Azim Premji.

Bhatt and his IT team spent nearly two hours with Wipro’s key executives, discussing possible partnerships. SBI, which has lined up an information technology spend of Rs 3,000 crore over the next two years. For starters, there is the data warehousing project, which the SBI team is saying will be only the second of its kind in India after a similar initiative from Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) two years ago.

While the country’s largest bank has already started the process to award the data warehousing contract, Wipro, along with data warehousing solutions provider, Teradata, had bagged the over Rs 50-crore LIC contract in 2006. Considered to be one of the biggest data warehousing projects of India, it was aimed at helping the public sector insurer study the trends not only among customers, but also its agency force.

Although the exact cost for the project is not known, an analyst said typically a data warehousing project accounts for 8-12 per cent of the total information technology budget, which in SBI’s case will amount to around Rs 250 crore or so.

When contacted, a senior Wipro executive said, “We have been working with SBI for many years. Like other IT service firms, we will also look at other opportunities and go through the bidding process.”

SBI executives too played down the meeting, saying that the bank is already working with all leading IT firms, which include Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Satyam Computer Services, Infosys and Wipro.

“All the major IT companies have submitted bids (for the data warehousing project) and by the end of the year we hope to finalise the vendor. We expect to complete the entire project in another 18 months,” said SBI Chief Information Officer BR Nath. The software developer would be engaged to develop life style products catering to the evolving needs of customers, which demands specific model building and access to right set of information.

“We would have a holistic view of the future requirements of the customers thereby ensure keeping pace with their changing profile,” Nath added while talking with Business Standard.

The meeting also comes at a time when Indian IT firms have been hit hard by the US financial market turmoil.