Wipro has won a $150 million (Rs 900 crore) IT outsourcing deal from the Allied Irish Banks (AIB), one of the big four commercial banks in Ireland. India's third largest IT services company will provide infrastructure management services (IMS), data centre and hosting services to AIB over five years.
"We are excited to partner with AIB in their journey to transform the Bank. We will bring our expertise to build agile and adaptive infrastructure while improving the predictability and cost effectiveness of services," said Rajan Kohli, senior vice president and global head � banking and financial services in Wipro.
The deal is Wipro's biggest win in Ireland and provides a gateway to participate in other IT deals including the Bank of Ireland contract that's coming up for renewal later this year. Bank of Ireland had signed a five-year infrastructure contract with IBM in 2010.
Besides Wipro, the bank has outsourced some of its IT projects to Ireland-based telecom company Eircom and IT security specialist Integrity Solutions. Wipro beat incumbent IT vendor IBM to bag the IMS portion of the contract, said sources. A recent report in the Irish Times said that AIB planned to outsource 170 jobs in its IT division to the three IT vendors, and the bank had committed that no staff would be made redundant. An email sent to Larry Broderick, general secretary of Irish Bank Officials Association (IBOA) on the details of negotiations with IT vendors remained unanswered till late Sunday.
Wipro is expected to rebadge over 130 AIB employees and absorb them into its new delivery centre that would be established in Dublin in the June quarter. The 200-seater delivery centre will create a mainframe centre of excellence to maintain and modernize business-critical mainframe applications. "The deal reinforces our commitment to grow and create local employment opportunities in Ireland. Wipro welcomes the colleagues joining Wipro as part of this transition. Wipro will be setting up a Dublin based ServiceNXT operations centre and the mainframe COE to provide career opportunities to these colleagues," said GK Prasanna, chief executive, global infrastructure services in Wipro.
Last year Wipro expanded its employee base at the Shannon development centre in Ireland that provides IT and business process services' (BPS) offerings to retail banking and insurance customers. The centre employs over 300 professionals delivering services to banks and financial services companies across Ireland and the UK.
An HfS Research report on IT deals signed in December showed 17 out of the 31 deals originated in Europe � across France, Germany, Netherlands, Nordics and the UK. Out of the 31 deals, 12 contracts were bagged by Europe-centric service providers such as IBM, Computacenter, CGI and Tieto.
