HCL Technologies, one of India’s top five IT services companies, said Anglo American, owner of De Beers diamond brand, has retained its services for another five years even as the mining company seeks to cut costs by leveraging cloud and digital technologies.
“The multi-year deal will see HCL continue to support Anglo American through the adoption of cloud; reducing Anglo Americans global data center footprint through the continued consolidation of its on-premise infrastructure and partial migration to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service operating model,” the NOIDA-based company said.
HCL had first been retained as the IT partner for the mining firm in 2013.
The group has a workforce of 69,000 spread across Africa, North and South America and Australia.
HCL Technologies did not specify the financial details of the contract. However, typically, deal sizes tend to come down when companies move from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud-based infrastructure.
HCL Senior Vice President Sandeep Saxena called the deal an example a “relationship that evolved” over time.
““Rather than standing still, our engagement with Anglo American has expanded into other areas where we can drive further value for its business through our more strategic Mode 2 offerings, such as Cloud Native Services.
“This is down to the strength of our working relationship with Anglo American, which gives it the trust that we can and will deliver on our commitment,” he said.
Saxena also emphasized that HCL’s key strength — its vast workforce spread over different countries in the world, will continue to play an important role even in the cloud era.
“Our global delivery model also has a particularly important role to play, adding significant value through a mix of onsite and offshore technical skills,” he said.
Indian companies like HCL and TCS have had to adapt to a market of much smaller, but more numerous contracts due to the emergence of cost-saving technologies such as cloud computing.
The win indicates that HCL’s cloud offerings were considered competitive enough by the global mining major.