Today Asia, tomorrow the world

Felser, later this year, will be taking charge of DaimlerChrysler's global Centre of Competence in Germany, which is responsible for developing IT solutions for the company's sales and marketing operations. "One of the first things I plan to do when I am back in Europe is to [geographically] widen our partnership with Infosys." DaimlerChrysler is not the only enterprise to have raved about its partnership with an Indian vendor. The Singapore Exchange too has selected an Indian partner, which, in this instance, is India's largest IT-services company.

It's a cruel world

International financial centres, on the hunt for opportunities to channel flows of global capital, have to do what it takes to look savvy and sophisticated. The Singapore Exchange Ltd., or SGX, epitomises this effort. "We're continuously on the search for technologies that will help us deliver quality services to our customers and participants," says Cher Hung Mong, a senior vice president and head of the SGX's IT application development department. A project that Cher and his colleagues is currently working on, that typifies their efforts to upgrade the SGX's capabilities, is in the reengineering of its central depository management applications. "We're currently Web-enabling these applications," says Cher. "This will enhance the Central Depository's market reach and enhance the user interface for our participants."

To achieve this target of web-enabling these applications, the SGX has partnered with India's largest IT-services company, Tata Consultancy Services, or TCS. "We started this project with TCS in October 2002,"says Cher. "It will take about one year to complete." TCS was one of three software companies that were short-listed from a list of initial bidders. Cher did not want to reveal who the other two finalists were, but he did share the reasons why the SGX selected TCS.

It's not cost alone

SGX had listed four key requirements in its selection process that the winning vendor had to satisfy: expertise in implementing solutions in the financial sector, expertise in implementing Java, willingness to transfer skills and share know-how, and, of course, it had to do all this at a reasonable price. "The first thing that attracted us to TCS was its experience in the financial industry: they have implemented solutions at several Indian and European stock exchanges," explains Cher. The second factor that drove the SGX to embrace TCS was the latter's expertise in implementing Java-based solutions. SGX hardly had, at the point of time they selected TCS, any Java expertise, whereas the latter had a large pool of professionals that have developed and implemented Java-based solutions. The third factor was intellectual property ownership. "SGX will own all the intellectual property and all the solutions that TCS will develop and implement for us," says Cher. "Given that we are new to Java, this transfer of skills and know-how is extremely important to us. TCS will also train a team of Java architects for the SGX." The final factor was cost. "TCS's quotation was very competitive and it was among the lowest-priced bidders." Of course, the SGX did the necessary homework to verify TCS's credentials and strengths before signing the latter on to the project. "One of the attractive features in TCS, that we discovered during our research, and which did give us a lot of comfort, was that it has a huge pool of skilled manpower to draw on for any of its projects," explains Cher. TCS has more than 16,000 software professionals on its payroll.

Crawl first, then walk

The first step that TCS took, upon starting work in the project, was to understand the Central Depository's existing processes. "The next step was to start on the development of the Web-based solution, without tinkering with the functions that came with the legacy system," says Cher. All this means that TCS does not have to develop any new business processes for the SGX. "TCS simply has to Web-enable the applications, using Java technology."