EDS gears up for Vodafone's $250 m order

MphasiS, which recently came under the EDS fold, will be executing $250 million worth of application development and maintenance (ADM) work for Vodafone over five years.

In November 2006, Vodafone announced that EDS and IBM will handle its ADM requirements targeting to cut the £560 million bill by 25-30 per cent in 3-5 years.

EDS, in turn, is offshoring a big chunk of this contract to India, the work on which is expected to start during first quarter of the next financial year.

Alok Mishra, chief financial officer, MphasiS, confirmed they will be working on the Vodafone project. He, however, added there was no specific contract value.

MphasiS is on an aggressive hiring spree for this contract and according to information available, it will deploy 2,000 developers for this account alone over the five years.

Vodafone anticipates that the outsourcing initiative to EDS and IBM will improve the quality of the software, provide greater flexibility, leading to the faster rollout of more varied services to its customers.

Vodafone, while announcing the outsourcing contract, said it will retain full strategic control of the initiative, which focuses on writing code for maintaining systems such as billing and customer relationship management applications.

It expects that the first wave of Vodafone operating companies will begin to adopt the new arrangements from early this year, with the others following suit soon.

Vodafone says the group spent an estimated £560 million on application development and maintenance during the last financial year.

"Under these deals, the number of application development and maintenance suppliers currently used by the group is expected to be rationalised by the two partners, bringing greater economies of scale," the company said.

According to Vodafone, its outfits in Germany, the UK, Hungary and the Netherlands will work with EDS while those in Spain, the Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Italy will work with IBM.

Each contract is set to run for seven years with Vodafone retaining the right to bring it to a close earlier if required.