HCL Technologies has acquired Volvo's external IT business and signed a global IT transformation deal. Bloomberg TV India caught up with Pankaj Tagra, Head of Nordics Business at HCL Technologies, to get the details of the deal.

What are the kinds of synergies you are looking at through the deal?

This is one of the largest IT transformation deals which any Indian company has signed. This involves around managing 3,500 applications for Volvo. We would be acquiring 20 data centres, 20,000 MIPS of mainframe capacity and people across 11 countries. We would be serving around 65,000 end-users of Volvo group globally. That is the internal part of the deal. In external part, we would be acquiring around 40 customers across Nordic and France. What it means for HCL is that it significantly enhances our presence in Nordic, which anyway is quite large. It also helps us to build up over capability on mainframe and automotive domain, something which most Indian IT companies have been lacking.

Are you happy with the deal value?

Volvo IT has been very careful in choosing its customers and they have been creating this business over 10 years with some of the largest brands in Nordic and France. The quality of customers and the quality of revenue they have is quite good. We are fairly satisfied and quite excited about the kind of customers we are acquiring and the capacity which we would be acquiring. That will be helping us to set up a global automotive domain centre in Gothenburg and also a very mature mainframe services in Gothenburg, Sweden, through which we would be serving our customers globally. So overall we are very excited and quite satisfied with the win-win which we have created. The external business revenue is around 1.6 billion Swedish krona. The external revenue is a fraction of the revenue which we would be acquiring as a part of internal business as well. That should give you a certain size and scale that this is a mega deal.

Are all clearances through as far as the Euro Zone goes? Are there any more clearances that are sought after the stage or is the clearance stage done with?

We have already got clearance from the European Commission in the last week of January.

So from that perspective we are very clear. But we still have to take a few steps in terms of how we work through in this transaction.

So we do not see any challenge in terms of any regulatory or clearance issues, which we did before signing the contract.

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