HCL Tech has won a $250-million deal from French telecom major Alcatel-Lucent.
The deal involves HCL taking up complete R&D work of Alcatel-Lucent in technologies such as 2G and 3G.
Further, HCL will co-create intellectual property and help the French telecom major innovate in these areas. When contacted, an HCL spokesperson confirmed the development. The deal comes a day after Alcatel-Lucent in its second quarter earnings told analysts that its short-term results would be ‘lumpy’, after its brief comeback to profitability in the preceding quarters that resulted in deal wins from Vodafone and LTE investments in China.
“Alcatel-Lucent is trying to steady its ship and clearly this effort points to significant cost savings and faster time to market,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, analyst with Greyhound Research.
For HCL, this deal follows a spate of multi-million dollar deals that the company bagged in the 2014 fiscal.
According to Prabhudas Lilladhar IT analyst Shashi Bhusan, HCL signed 14 multi-million dollar, multi-year deals that were estimated to have total contract value of $2 billion. However, most of these deals have been won in the area of IT infrastructure management, which involves taking over of IT assets of global pharmaceutical, financial institutions or telecom companies and running them.
This is the first big ticket deal that the company has won in the area of engineering R&D, which contributed 7.4 per cent to its overall revenues, according to company data.