Xerox outsources management of data centers to India's HCL

IDG News Service - India-based outsourcer HCL Technologies Ltd. will provide data center services to Xerox Corp. under a six-year contract.

The value of the deal is about $100 million, according to a source close to the situation. Under the contract, HCL will run nine Xerox data centers in the U.S. and Europe.

The services that HCL will provide include management of midrange systems as well as business continuity and disaster recovery, the outsourcing vendor announced today. It also will be in charge of data center migration, virtualization, server consolidation and Xerox's storage architecture.

The Xerox contract is the third large remote infrastructure management deal bagged by HCL thus far this year.

Last month, the vendor nabbed a seven-year, $350 million outsourcing contract from The Reader's Digest Association Inc. in Pleasantville, N.Y., for IT infrastructure management, application development and other services. HCL said it will provide IT services to Reader's Digest operations in 45 countries.

In addition, HCL announced in January that it had won a five-year contract from Nokia Corp. for outsourced desktop management and help desk services across 76 countries.

IT infrastructure services accounted for 15.3% of HCL's revenue in the fourth quarter of last year.

A number of Indian outsourcers are targeting remote infrastructure management as the next big opportunity, after previously focusing largely focused on application development and maintenance.

The new outsourcing agreement is the second major IT-related deal between Xerox and HCL in recent months. Last November, the two companies announced that HCL would be a systems integrator for Xerox's managed print services offering on a worldwide basis.