TCS plots high end services push

Indian IT services firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is set to accelerate its drive into the IT consultancy market with the launch next month of a new services programme designed to help firms optimise their entire IT ecosystem.

The company said the new OptimizeIT service had been piloted for over a year with existing customers and provided IT departments with consultancy services for benchmarking their current operations, identifying "opportunities for improvement", and developing strategies for meeting these goals.

Arun Aggarwal, head of TCS' global consulting practice in Europe, said the new service was indicative of the company's increased range of high end consultancy services. "We've had the downstream IT services for some time," he said. "But now we've added the high end consulting that allows us to offer an end-to-end IT service."

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, director at the National Outsourcing Association, said that some customers may have concerns about the ability of an Indian-based company to offer "high-touch" consultancy services, but argued that such reservations were increasingly outdated. "TCS knows consultancy is more of a high touch model, but there is also a lot of grunt work in the middle of a consultancy project that could go offshore," he said. "In theory this model can work."

TCS said that despite providing more on-site consultancy services the company will still be able to compete on cost with US-based rivals. "We will still be able to offer these new services at better value for money [than many US IT services firms]," said Aggarwal. "But while the cost differential continues to be attractive we also compete on service quality and reliability."