16 TATA INFOTECH: Gearing Up To Show Its Mettle

Tata Infotech might have had a bad year in 1999-2000, but the company plans to forge ahead with new partnerships.

The new millenium started on a bad note for Tata Infotech. The performance of the company was below par, a mere eight percent growth at Rs 432 crore compared to Rs 401 crore in the previous fiscal. Profits on the other hand, fell from Rs 47.21 crore in 1998-99 to Rs 12.20 crore in 1999-2000. One of reasons given was the quicker exhaustion of Y2K related work and the other was the change in the business strategy of Unisys, its main alliance partner. The lesson of the year "was not to depend on others to bring in business and technology" as Nirmal Jain, MD puts it.

However, all was not lost in 1999-2000 as systems integration, one of the key business areas of Tata Infotech grew by 79 percent. The compnay was also ranked highest among Indian companies in the Forbes Global 100 for companies with less than US$ 500 million turnover.

For the current year, Tata Infotech has decided to keep its targets realistic and expects to have an overall growth rate of 25 percent. To attain this Tata Infotech is planning on some new initiatives like investing on e-commerce products and in companies in the international market. Tata Infotech also plans to enter IT enabled services like call centers.

Tata Infotech’s domestic business consists of systems integration projects, sales and services related to proprietary and third party software products. Some of the major orders bagged were from VSNL, State Bank of India and the road transport organizations of states like Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Tata Infotech partners with Unisys, Oracle, Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, SCO, G&A, Lucent, IBM, Business Objects, BaaN, Compaq and Dell.

The current emphasis is on improving profit margins and creating focussed specialities and replicate solutions. Tata Infotech considers these areas as being of strategic importance for its long-term goal of moving up the value chain and building high-end capabilities for international markets.