Bank of India: Big First Steps for Domestic Outsourcing

Another milestone in the domestic IT outsourcing landscape was Bank Of India's

(BoI) $150 mn contract awarded to HP in early 2004. For one, this 10-year

outsourcing deal was the first one to be inked by a PSU bank, dispelling the

prevailing myth of IT reticence among the government banks. Second, it was HP's

largest contract in Asia-Pacific, which proved the maturity of India Inc.

Under the terms of the agreement, HP has implemented and is managing the data

warehousing and document imaging, and it is also providing integrated channel

management, including: tele-banking, Internet banking, and ATMs for BoI. It is

also managing a data center, DR site, helpdesk, as well as call center for the

bank. Most importantly, it supervised the implementation and management of

Finacle core banking solution from Infosys, across BoI's 750 branches in

India. HP also manages BoI's servers, desktops, and peripherals across the

branches, which have implemented the core banking solution, and provides asset

refresh and obsolescence protection for the bank's IT assets.

The cost of the outsourcing option, according to the contract, is fixed for a

period of ten years. The contract also clearly defines the capacity requirements

based on the possible business growth for BoI over the next ten years.

"This way, we are avoiding any uncertain expenses on technology,"

explains D Krishnamurthy, GM, IT, Bank of India.

As a result of his meticulous planning, the contract has strict SLA levels,

to be monitored by sophisticated tools for measurement.

BoI-HP Deal at a Glance

• The contract covers 750 branches under the scope of this
  
  deal, users, six million transactions, 40 million accounts, and has a very
  
  detailed and granular SLA.

• Besides deploying core-banking and data-warehouse
  
  activities, HP has assumed responsibility for project management,
  
  configuration management, change; and release management, incident and
  
  problem management, capacity management, and availability management.

• The Outsourcing Excellence award in 'Best First Steps'
  
  category, sponsored by Outsourcing Center and Everest Group.