Mumbai/New Delhi, Oct. 16 HCL Infosystems has emerged the lowest bidder for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd’s South Zone IT deal with a bid of Rs 865 crore.

HCL Info’s bid is backed by multinational IT firms including Convergys and Hewlett-Packard.

Other companies that were a part of the bidding process include TCS, Mahindra Satyam, Wipro and Infosys Technologies.

While TCS’ bid was the second lowest at Rs 906 crore, Mahindra Satyam, Wipro and Infosys bid Rs 1,030 crore, Rs 1,500 crore and Rs 2,000 crore respectively, according to top sources close to the development. The bids were opened on Friday by BSNL.

Senior BSNL officials said that the financial bid by HCL Infosystems will be evaluated and it will go through the normal process of negotiations before the contract is awarded. The entire process should be completed in a month’s time.

HCL Infosystems’ qualification for the bid was uncertain until Thursday as the company had not signed with BSNL for an unconditional undertaking.

However, the company completed the process late in the evening, thereby becoming eligible for the bid. In March, HCL Infosystems has bagged Rs 230-crore ERP deal from BSNL.

GSM project


The South Zone IT contract is part of BSNL’s 93-million line GSM project which was divided into four including network equipment, tower infrastructure and IT. Each of these parts has been further divided into four zones.

While the network equipment part has got stuck in controversy after BSNL disqualified Nokia Siemens from the bidding process, the IT part of the project is yet to be awarded. The total IT deal across all four zones is worth a billion dollars.

The financial bid for the North Zone is expected to be opened next week for which all the IT majors have put in their applications.

BSNL had invited bids for setting up operations support systems (OSS) and business support system (BSS) software. OSS and BSS solutions are designed to help service providers achieve superior customer service and rapid time to market for new products and services.

The role of Business Support Systems in a service provider is to cover four main areas of product management, customer management, revenue management and order management. This also includes the billing software which tracks the duration of calls and the charges..... the hindu business-line link

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