Virginia based CSC outbids HCL for $600 Million ArcelorMittal IT deal

In a deal considered as one of Europe’s biggest IT contracts, steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal will be upgrading their IT infrastructure. Priced at $600 Million, the 5 year contract to consolidate the steel giant’s IT systems across Europe was closely competed.
Global heavyweights in the field such as IBM, HP, Capgemini were bidding along with Computer Science Corporation (CSC), Wipro and HCL. Earlier rumors placed Wipro as the front runner since Wipro was already in a 5 year contract with ArcelorMittal working on unifying their messaging systems. However, it came down to HCL and CSC in the end with CSC outbidding HCL.
CSC has close to 25,000 employees in India and quite a bit of the new ArcelorMittal contract is expected to be done in India. CEO of Outsourcing and Investment advisory firm Tholons, Avinash Vashishtha gave a few reasons as to why CSC is a better choice for Arcelor Mittal:

• CSC’s presence in Europe helps them navigate through the outsourcing laws which HCL cannot.
• CSC will be able to provide packaged solutions for applications development whereas HCL will have to develop applications specifically for ArcelorMittal.

According to Avinash Vashishtha, it will cost CSC less compared to HCL for deploying these systems. As part of the contract, CSC will be maintaining ArcelorMittal’s data centers to increase efficiency. ArcelorMittal is expected to reduce costs by upto 20-30% once the systems are in place