Tech rules. That's the strong message that comes from the second annual listing by this magazine of companies that have used information technology to their advantage (and ours). The listing is diverse enough to display the universal benefits of technology: there are the wired buffaloes of Maharashtra's Chitale Dairy, the restoration and colourisation software of the Indian Academy of Arts and Animation (the people who restored Mughal-e-Azam), the GPS-enabled fleet (or part of it) of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, and the e-education initiative of the Tamil Nadu government and the state's Anna University. There are also representatives from usual suspects banking and IT such as IBM, Bharti Tele-Ventures and HDFC Bank. The moral: it isn't who you are or what technology you use that counts; it is how you use it that does.

APOLLO HOSPITALS
Remote relief provider
Call The Doctor

Apollo Hospitals' Chairman Dr. P.C. Reddy: The pioneer in organised healthcare is now eyeing another frontier, telemedicine; last year some 13,000 patients across the country availed this service

This writer can speak about Apollo's medical equipment (the chain is arguably the best equipped in India) or its medical business process outsourcing initiative (through subsidiary Apollo Health Street), but she'd rather talk about the 13,000 patients that availed the chain's telemedicine service last year. Telemedicine may be one of those buzzwords that have been doing the rounds for some time, but 2004 saw the number of patients availing Apollo's facility double. The13,000 includes patients from Dimapur, Nagaland, Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu, Andaman & Nicobar, even Lahore. The chain's 70 telemedicine centres promise not just super-speciality consultation, but even consultation for basic specialities. Doctors view diagnostic tests online and offer their advice to patients. "With the help of technology we have widened the gap between us and our nearest competitors," says Ashok Anantaram, Head (Business Development), Apollo. Well, if it is distance that is being discussed, Apollo has rendered the one between doctors and patients irrelevant.

-Nitya Vvaradarajan

BHARATPLANET
Online application seller
Death Of A Salesman

BharatPlanet's T. Chandramohan: Look Ma, no salesmen, and we are actually thriving

One day in the middle of 2004, T. Chandramohan, the founder and CEO of BharatPlanet, a Chennai-based provider of web applications, decided to do away with his marketing team. That was a big call for a company that had, until then, depended on a marketing team, here and in the US, to bring home the bacon, but Chandramohan was convinced that online sales would do the trick. It did. Expenditure plummeted while monthly revenues had trebled by November 2004. BharatPlanet's products-a mass e-mailing facilitator, a workforce application and a core application for direct sellers-are largely targeted at small- and mid-sized firms in India and the us that pay between $5,000 and $30,000 (Rs 2,20,000 to Rs 13,20,000) for an application, money that translates into a billing rate of between $12 (Rs 528) and $14 (Rs 616) an hour. Online selling works for his company, reasons Chandramohan because, "there is no blind selling; we reach only the target audience".

-Nitya Varadarajan

See the smile? In 2004, Bharti Tele-Ventures gave customers enough reason to; here an obviously happy customer fiddles with her BlackBerry, an e-mail-on mobile device launched by the company in India

BHARTI TELE-VENTURES
BlackBerry, WiMax and more, that's why
Technology Edge

Its own internal it function outsourced completely to IBM, Bharti Tele-Ventures-it provides telephony and broadband services under the Airtel brand and has over 10 million mobile telephony customers alone across India-spent much of the year adopting the kind of innovative technologies that reduces costs, makes a difference to the customer or changes the rules of the game. Among these are the launch of BlackBerry, its pilot project to implement WiMax, a wireless broadband technology, its roll-out of edge networks to facilitate the next level of data services, and things like Hello Tunes, which allows users to customise the tone anyone calling them up will hear. "We have done quite a few things across our network, it and for the end-user," puts Jai Menon, Corporate Director (it & Technology), Bharti, succinctly. That it has.

-Supriya Shrinate

CDFD
The DNA-fingerprinting people
Hi-tech Cop And More

There's little that suggests Seyed Eehtesham Hasnain, the ever-smiling, 50-year-old director of the Hyderabad-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD) is a policeman, yet every time he meets with police officers, a frequent occurrence in his case, he is asked which batch of the Indian Police Service he belongs to. That's because of the growing use of DNA fingerprinting in law enforcement and investigation, a phenomenon that has seen CDFD, as it is popularly abbreviated, become a brand of sorts. Yet there is more to the institute than meets the eye: it is creating databases of endangered species of animals, disease patterns across India and convicts, (DNA) fingerprinting plants and seeds for the purpose of filing patents, and working, in association with Sun Microsystems, to set up the world's first centre of excellence in clinical bioinformatics. Wired? You bet, and organically so.

-E. Kumar Sharma

Chitale Dairy Farms: The future of dairy farming is here

CHITALE DAIRY FARMS
Digital Dairy
Four Legs Better

The buffaloes at Chitale Dairy's Farm in Bhilawadi, a town 250 km from Pune in Maharashtra, and in 12 satellite farms in the vicinity, sport radio frequency id (rfid) tags, so that the company can monitor and control every aspect of their lives that has a bearing on their output. "Cost reduction at every level is critical and this is where technology comes in," explains Vishwas Chitale, who handles the dairy operations for this family-controlled business whose turnover is in the region of Rs 150 crore. There's more. The aforementioned RFID tags carry information to the company's technology nervous system, Control Net; this, in turn, uses these as inputs to control the automated production plants that are wired with soft logic processors. "All production data, which is logged and analysed, is finally available to the top management on call so that production costs can be monitored," adds Chitale. Henry Ford would have been very very impressed.

-Priya Srinivasan

DELHI METRO RAIL CORP.
Drive-by-tech
On Track

DMRC's Managing Director E. Sreedharan: Smart tunnels; smarter technology

Delhi's DMRC-it would have, by march 2006, commissioned 63 km of track-is a heavy-enough user of technology (it has invested some Rs 900 crore in it) to claim that it can run trains without a driver. "I doubt commuters would like that," grins R.S.T. Sai, General Manager (Finance), DMRC. The entire length of the Metro is linked by fibre-optic cable, the backbone of the company's communication system that manages the automated signalling process and provides bandwidth for cellular companies wishing to be on-air in a subterranean environment. "The it practices we have in place are comparable to the best in the world," boasts Prashant Rao, Chief Communication Engineer, DMRC. So much so that even the company's smart card-based automated fare collection system comes with a mechanism to prevent loitering (if you have not left the Metro system 75 minutes after you have entered it, the smart card readers will alert the cops).

-Kushan Mitra

Godrej & Boyce's Deputy General Manager Barinder Singh: This isn't a phone; it is a conduit into the organisation's ERP system

GODREJ & BOYCE
The mobile phone can do even more
A Nifty Key

It's purely one of those perceptual things, but Godrej & Boyce, a company with eight business divisions spanning refrigerators, furniture, security equipment, typewriters and storage isn't top-of-the-mind for this writer when it comes to being wired. Still, in what must be a first of sorts, Godrej & Boyce's entire ERP (enterprise resource planning) system, an information-aided management support system that runs through the company, is available to all executives in the sales and marketing function on their mobile phones. Godrej & Boyce worked with telco Hutch to design a SIM (subscriber identity module) card with a customised menu that makes it possible for the user to access information on billings, outstanding payments, collections and stock position. Users can also access specific information by sending an SMS that is routed to the company's server, which, in turn, replies with the information, again in SMS format, through a modem. Users can also set alerts to access information according to a pre-ordained schedule. For instance, a regional sales manager can set an alert to access information on weekly sales in a particular city every Friday at close of business; the server will generate the information on the basis of invoices generated and SMS it to the manager. Some 3,000 employees of Godrej & Boyce are currently part of the wireless deployment initiative and the benefits have been significant enough for the company to roll it out to 150 dealers. "We have never adopted technology for the sake of it," says George Menezes, Head (Commercial Organisation), Godrej & Boyce. "We evaluate technologies regularly and adopt them as and when we need them; we are the first company to offer such a menu on the mobile phone." That, it is.

-Priya Srinivasa

HDFC BANK
Incremental IT
Sweating The Small Things

HDFC Bank's NetSafe: The card's auto-destruct facility should prevent online frauds

The role of technology in making HDFC Bank India's best (according to the BT-KPMG study), as well as helping it grow aggressively, is pretty well known (this magazine has written extensively on it). That isn't the reason HDFC Bank finds itself in this listing; the reason for that is the company's incremental tech initiatives, such as NetSafe, a dynamically generated self-destructing online payment card (HDFC Bank account holders can use this to shop online, specifying its time of destruction while creating it). There are other initiatives along the same line, SMS-based top-ups for Hutch's pre-paid customers and mobile banking for Reliance Infocomm subscribers, small things that make a lot of difference to the user, external and internal (one of the things the bank's it chief C.N. Ram is proud of is an SMS-based alerts system for all bank executives in their respective areas of operation). "The return-on-technology investments is calculated purely in terms of business benefits, which are either savings realised through operations or just straight through processing," says Ram. This is nothing if not a technology based business.

-Priya Srinivasan

Asmita Thakur @IBM: Thanks to something called the On-Demand workplace, Thakur is at home in Bangalore, yet doing her job as an application developer; IBM, clearly, believes in eating its own dog food

IBM
Flexiplace employer
At Home, Everywhere

Had she been working elsewhere, Asmita Thakur, a 30-something young mother would be rushing into office a little after nine every morning, the effects of a hectic chore-filled morning and a harried commute showing on her. Working, as she does at IBM, Thakur, an application developer, just logs on from home and does her work. Big Blue doesn't make it to this listing because of this feel-good-young-mother-working-from-home bit; it does because of something called On-Demand (the term is popular at the company right now, a corporate theme, selling spiel, and advertising term rolled into one) workplace. This is a blend of hardware, software, services and expertise that creates a virtual environment where employees can do their work and interact with others, employees, partners, suppliers, even customers. Like a good tech company, IBM eats its own dog food, which explains why employees like Thakur can work on-demand. "The benefits of a workplace that can be accessed from anywhere include cost savings, the ability to exchange information with mobile workforces, and sharing and managing business knowledge," says Martin Appel, Country Manager (HR), IBM India. In a city like Bangalore, where Thakur lives, it also means freedom from stress-inducing traffic.

-Rahul Sachitanand

INDIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND ANIMATION
The Mughal-e-Azam restorers
Remaking Classics

Mughal-e-Azam in colour: IAAA's restoration and colourisation software was the real hero of this magnum opus

Two years ago, a fire at the national film archives in Pune destroyed some treasured prints. It also got Rajiv Dwivedi, then a 30-something software jock with the city-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, thinking about how the damage could have been contained. Spotting an opportunity, Dwivedi teamed up with an old friend, Umar Siddiqui, and founded Indian Academy of Arts and Animation (IAAA). The duo planned to digitise existing films and set up an animation school; instead, it bagged a king-size contract-the restoration and colourisation of the 1960s classic Mughal-e-Azam. The software did not exist in India and doing it abroad would have cost over Rs 15 crore as opposed to the Rs 5 crore the effort cost. So, Dwivedi set out to develop the software, writing in controls for light, even building in an artificial intelligence component with the help of historians from Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, to identify colours of the Mughal period. Thus, when one animator was trying to colour a rose red, the software rebelled. Reason? The red rose is a hybrid variety that came into existence long after Mughal emperor Akbar's time. The process took over a year, but judging from the critical and commercial acclaim the relaunch has received, it has been a year well spent. Impressed, Universal Studios has awarded IAAA the contract to colourise 20 Sherlock Holmes classics. If you catch sight of a lot of dressed up vintage footage at the local multiplex you know where it all began.

-Priya Srinivasan

ITC IBD's Sivakumar: There's money to be made in the rural marketplace; the trick is to know what to charge for and what not to

ITC
Tapping the real marketplace
Mass Movement

It isn't the technology it uses that makes ITC's e-choupal initiative, part of the company's international business division (IBD) that essentially trades in agri-commodities, unique. It is the way it uses technology: to create an information chain (rural communities share and receive information related to markets for their products) layered over with a physical distribution chain (this facilitates buying from the farmers and, in turn, selling to them). ITC believes that by leveraging gaps in infrastructure, it can make money on some services without actually charging the customer anything. For instance, it can provide printed copies of land records sourced from a central registry free to farmers, counting on the footfalls this service generates to its choupals to sell other products. Some 35 companies, including Monsanto, Marico, Philips, ICICI, even LIC, have bought into this model and S. Sivakumar, Chief Executive, ITC IBD, says, "The platform will soon carry health, education and BPO (business process outsourcing) services." With 5,050 choupals (and six opening every day) covering 31,000 villages and 3 million farmers, ITC can probably make a go of it. For the record, since the movement (it is nothing short of that) began in 1999-2000, the IBD's contribution to ITC's revenues has doubled from 5 per cent to over 10 per cent (in 2003-04).

-E. Kumar Sharma

KARNATAKA STATE ROAD TRANSPORT CORP.
GPS user
Eye In The Sky

Note the black box: This is what helps the bus talk to a satellite

Here's a problem most state-owned transport corporations face. All retain buses on contract (their ownership is private, but they fly the state transport corporation's colours); while plying busy routes, these invariably bypass scheduled stops in small, but congested, towns because that would mean more road-time, preferring to stick to the faster (and easier) route. Waiting passengers miss out on scheduled arrivals, but there is little they can do. Nor can the state transport corporation monitor things, not unless it has an eye in the sky. That's exactly what Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has done. Thanks to a Global Positioning System (for the benefit of the uninitiated, GPS is about the use of satellites, receivers and software to pinpoint the exact position of an object), the corporation can track the location of its buses (across the country, should the need arise). And apart from ensuring that buses make all scheduled stops, the system can help the corporation "look at speed, fuel efficiency and turnaround time", according to Bhaskar Rao, Director (Security and Vigilance), KSRTC. Now restricted to 70 buses, the corporation's GPS project will soon cover 3,000 of its fleet of 12,000. That's a start.

-Rahul Sachitanand

Lason's Nevatia: The company has a revolutionary vendor management process

LASON INDIA
Supply chain innovator
Vendor Management

It is common for carmakers to outsource entire assemblies that are, in turn, outsourced. Business process outsourcing (BPO) is built around the same premise although it isn't common to find further outsourcing in this industry. Lason India, a software-cum-BPO firm that targets the financial services space, has done just that by outsourcing to a clutch of 60 business associates across Chennai, Pondicherry and Kanchipuram that together employ 5,000. Lason uses the corDect technology, developed by IIT Madras, for its wide area network; the company has a web-based training package that associates can put recruits through; and it has even customised desktop applications to reduce the threat of virus attacks. "We invested 1 per cent and got 4 per cent returns," gushes Pradeep Nevatia, Managing Director, Lason India. Tech is like that.

-Nitya Varadarajan

The right fit: Customers will never have to be shaped like mannequins, thanks to Madura Garments' Made-To-Measure initaitive; and the company's ability to capture and act on fashion quirks helps it tweak its production process optimally

MADURA GARMENTS
Sharp clothes-smith
Capturing Quirks

Fashion can be a tricky business. The evanescence of it all can make or break a business, as any retailer left with a thousand pairs of mukluk-imitation boots will aver. It is, then, the ability to cope with fleeting fashion trends with the aid of technology that makes Bangalore-based apparel maker Madura Garments, part of the Aditya Birla Group, unique, not its efforts in the direction of customising suits and keeping this information on a central database (the Made-To-Measure suits initiative; customers can merely quote their unique customer number the next time they are ordering a suit, provided they have neither put on nor lost weight) or creating business- and employee portals (these are, no doubt, laudable, but it is the fashion bit that earns the company a mention in this listing). Thus, executives at the company do not dismiss a customer buying a white shirt rather than a blue one as a quirk, as most executives at other companies are likely to; instead they collate data on buying patterns and use the same to weed out underperforming stock-keeping units and stocking up on popular ones. "We can't have technology in isolation; we have integrated it with our customer services," says Hemachandra Javeri, President, Madura Garments.

-Rahul Sachitanand

MTR's Suresh: In the sambhar he is stirring, and in all other products of the company, IT is the key ingredient

MTR FOODS
Intelligent ERP user
The Secret Ingredient

Those reluctant to use the term complexity in association with the foods business clearly do not know MTR Foods. The Bangalore-based firm, an offshoot of that hallowed eatery Mavalli Tiffin Rooms, makes and sells some 240 different ready-to-eat foods, mixes and spices. Each stock-keeping unit (SKU), in turn, requires the use of 15-odd ingredients in varying quantities, with additional constraints regarding quality thrown in. For instance, the cumin powder used in channa masala (a traditional north Indian preparation involving a type of lentil) powder has to have a certain level of moisture-too little moisture, explain the company's in-house experts, will make the powder too dry and too much will kill the taste. A small company can afford to get away with hand measures and the consequent variation in taste across batches; not MTR Foods, a Rs 123-crore company in which JP Morgan partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase, has a 28 per cent stake, and is headed by J. Suresh, who once ran Hindustan Lever Limited's beverages business. The company's response has been to implement an enterprise resource planning package from sap, and leverage this to monitor both production and sales. "Technology helps us solve complexity," says Suresh. "We operate in a wide range of categories and technology helps us keep track of all our products." The man is also counting on technology to help the company's overseas prospects. Although 80 per cent of MTR Foods' revenues comes from the domestic market, it has slowly increased its presence in the US and the UK. "There are over 1.8 million Indians in the us and many of them want to eat home food," says Suresh. Crunching order and delivery times is one thing; creating an online-interface for customers to check on the status of their orders is another. And to think it all began with a restaurant.

-Rahul Sachitanand

PANTALOON
RFID innovator
Clothes Tags

RFID @ Pantaloon: An employee at Pantaloon's warehouse displays the tags the company's apparel now come with; bar code readers and scanners are irrelevant

That Pantaloon retail is one of India's more aggressive retail companies is well known; what isn't is its standing as a technology innovator. The company has initiated a pilot on the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags at its warehouse in Tarapore to streamline its supply chain process. Currently being applied to its private label, the RFID tagging will be extended to other suppliers shortly. Apparel tagged with RFID at the factory makes its way to the warehouse, and then leaves the Pantaloon premises when the sale is booked. Right through this process, there is no human intervention at all. "This eliminates the need for bar coding and scanning completely; the in-house ERP system picks up the RFID data, thereby recording every single transaction," explains Chinar Deshpande, Head (it), Pantaloon.

-Priya Srinivasan

The final touches: A technician at Prime Focus' post-production facility fine-tunes a mainstream production; thanks to the company, Bollywood releases now look as slick as, well, ad films

PRIME FOCUS
Bollywood's own cutting-edge post-production house
Take The Red Pill

The burly brawl it isn't, but the inspiration behind several Akshay Kumars (one Bollywood hunk in the singular) fighting a lone Salman Khan (another Bollywood hunk) in Mujhse Shaadi Karogi? (Will you marry me?), a motion picture released in 2004, is apparent. The sequence was made possible by a Milo motion control rig, a product that fetched its creators an Academy Award (Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts & Sciences Scientific and Engineering Award) in 1999 ("This radically original and effective solution to the problems of high-speed camera motion was achieved with the combination of novel geometry and dedicated three-dimensional control software," said the Academy in its release). The Milo is just one of the ways in which Prime Focus, a Mumbai-based post-production house, is making Bollywood edgier, at least in terms of technology. Another, a more visible change effected by the company, is the way some of the newer releases, such as Musafir (Traveller) and Naach (Dance) look, smooth, like a 30-second ad film or a Hollywood motion picture. This is the effect of digital intermediate technology, tech-speak for transferring motion pictures from analogue to digital format, upgrading picture quality through colour correction and other means, and then transferring them to the analogue format (negatives) again for screening. Prime Focus, which claims to be the largest facility of its kind in Asia, employs this technology on a scale that would make a mass-manufacturer envious. The company handles the post-production of at least two big banner motion pictures every month, 60 per cent of all ad films made and 80 per cent of motion picture trailers. "We see a 25 per cent increase in the technology budgets of filmmakers year-on-year," says Namit Malhotra, Managing Director, Prime Focus. The man has a simple benchmark for rationalising all technology investments (like the Milo in which Prime invested). "On any new service line where the investment is in the region of Rs 8-10 crore, I look at a 36-month recovery period; it's a question of blending technology with market expectations." That is a blend this studio has perfected.

-Priya Srinivasan

RANBAXY
Digital documentation
Magic Pill

Ranbaxy's hi-tech lab: Its digital output accelerates application filing

Ranbaxy's tryst with hi-tech began with a mandate from Wal-Mart, a pioneer in the use of technology to manage vendors and inventory, and one of the company's largest customers in the us, that all prescription drugs of a certain type needed to be tagged with radio frequency id (RFID) tags that contained all information relevant to the product. That was in the middle of last year. Since then, Ranbaxy, no laggard itself when it comes to technology (even in 2003 the company had started work on electronically filing applications for approvals for marketing drugs in the us to that country's Food and Drugs Administration, FDA, a first for an Indian company) has leveraged it to good effect along two dimensions: monitoring its considerable R&D efforts (the company's R&D lab is based in Gurgaon and the initial emphasis was not on automation but, justifiably, on getting the basic research infrastructure in place), and archiving data so as to generate online the substantial documentation accompanying any filing it makes to the FDA. Today, 300 of the 1,200 nodes in the company's R&D network are connected to a central database and all data is collected and archived automatically. "This helps us to control our data better and aids collaborative decisions, because one lab can see data coming from the other at any given time," says Dinesh Thakur, Director (Research Information and Project Management), Ranbaxy. The online process reduces the time required to archive data by as much as 60 per cent to 80 per cent in some cases and makes the data required to file applications available on tap; even better, all data is in electronic format. Storing, archiving and documenting data related to the drug manufacturing and discovery processes is becoming increasingly important in the pharmaceutical industry, and Thakur is confident that Ranbaxy's investments in technology will result in a return of investment of anything between 15 per cent and a fulsome 100 per cent in the long term.

-Supriya Shrinate

Anna Earth Station: The university, already into satellite education, and the govenment are working on e-education

TAMIL NADU GOVERNMENT-ANNA UNIVERSITY ALLIANCE
Wired education network
School Online

If all goes well, by 2007, Tamil Nadu will be the most wired state in the country from the perspective of e-learning, or e-education. At the core of this Rs 20- crore project that will kick off next month, is a Knowledge Data Centre (kdc) coming up at Tamil Nadu's Anna University (it is based in Chennai and is the government's partner in this exercise). The KDC will house information, in digital format, that can be accessed by students across the state. "The data centre will become a technology resource," explains E. Balagurusamy, Vice Chancellor, Anna University, adding that the centre will connect all engineering colleges, government-run polytechnic institutes, medical colleges, law, arts and science colleges, and higher secondary schools. In effect, the KDC will become the central hub for promoting research activities, apart from disseminating knowledge (of course) and offering services such as e-learning, distance learning, a digital library and the like (phew!). In the first phase itself, KDC is expected to save some Rs 10 crore for the government: first- and second-year engineering students will substitute some lectures with KDC content. Will it work? Well, Tamil Nadu is wired enough to make it happen and Anna University is a pioneer of sorts in e-learning, with its Edusat programme covering 33 engineering colleges.

-Nitya Varadarajan

YES BANK
It rents IT
Pay Per Use

A YES Bank branch: All it you see here, hardware inclusive, belongs to Wipro

What Bharti did with its it requirements in the telecommunications space (see story on the company in this listing), Yes Bank has done in the banking one. Like telecommunications, banking is a technology-intensive business; indeed, it has the power to make or break banks, which is what makes Yes Bank's decision to adopt a unique technology rental model (Wipro is its partner) all the more unique. "We are entering the market a decade after the first private banks," says H. Srikrishnan, Executive Director, Yes Bank. "As a new bank with limited capital, we cannot invest vast amounts in technology and at the same time need the sophistication of existing players right from the start; so we decided to partner with a tech firm and go with a variable cost model or pay per use model on all our technology." In effect, Yes Bank will not own any of the technology it will use across its branches and headquarters (nearly 10 branches will be opened in the next two months, 30 by next March and 60 by March 2007). In a first of its kind 'build-own-operate' deal, Wipro Infotech will own, integrate, implement and manage all Yes Bank's it requirements, including data centres, servers, networks, security and branch office user desktops. The contract, which Yes Bank estimates will result in a cost saving of at least 30 per cent on technology, has a fixed price element as well as a usage-based pricing, and Wipro's return on its seven-year contract is entirely contingent on the bank's objective of scaling up to 700 branches during the contract's lifetime. Interestingly, Wipro doesn't account for the assets in its own books either; they simply become 'supply of equipment' as part of the service (technically a 'sale of receivables' on Wipro's balance sheet). The arrangement is clearly a first and on its success will depend the future of many a total outsourcing contract.

Priya Srinivasan