Mid-tier IT firm MindTree on Wednesday said that it has successfully increased the wallet share of two of its existing customers, bagging new projects valued at $70 million for five years. The wins, in the infrastructure management space, are fairly large by mid-tier standards ? smaller IT services firms have got used to multi-year deal sizes of around $5-10 million.
Analysts FE spoke to noticed the timing of the announcement ? it comes at a time when industry watchers had grown pessimistic about the mid-tier IT services story in India.
The firm said the two deals came from ?one of the largest information and communication technology (ICT) service-providers in Europe? and a mid-sized US-based bank. Sources said the european customer is Benelux-based Getronics, but MindTree did not confirm, saying ?we would not be able to shed light on who these clients are specifically.?
MindTree noted it would use its managed services platform MWatch to provide services from India. Areas of work include application and infrastructure support services, telecom support services and remote desktop management services. MindTree?s infrastructure management business has about 1,000 people and is one of the fastest growing service lines.
Rostow Ravanan, CFO, MindTree, told FE that the wins are exciting from multiple perspectives. ?There are reports that small companies are not getting the benefit of growth as much as the large companies and large deals are not coming to smaller companies. These wins prove the theory wrong. If you have strong capabilities, large deals can be won even by mid-sized companies,? he said. Another positive, he added, was that the projects are platform-based and not linear or people dependent.
?The deals were closed a few days back. However, deals typically go through two-three months of knowledge transfer before billing starts,? the CFO said. MindTree, has been in the news over the resignation of executive chairman an co-founder Ashok Soota. MindTree’s Board will decide on the next chairman in April.
Firm penalises employee for code violation
A MindTree employee has been fined Rs 25,000 by the firm’s audit committee for violation of the code of conduct for prevention of insider trading in securities. In a note to the BSE, the firm said that there has been a violation of code of conduct by N Vijayalakshmi, administrator. On investigation it was found that the violation was not intentional and was inadvertent. The chairman of the audit committee has directed Vijayalakshmi to deposit Rs 25,000 in favour of MindTree Foundation, as fine. Vijayalakshmi had sold 4,290 shares of the company on February 7 this year.
