Siemens Business Services has been selected by the BBC as the corporation's main outsourcing vehicle and the owner of BBC Technology.

The 10-year contract is worth up to £2bn and bound to be a disappointment to Accenture, the other IT services company left on the shortlist after CSC's withdrawal.

The BBC operations to be outsourced employ around 1,500 staff and last year turned over £220m. They cover areas such as IT, telecoms, consulting, project services and broadcast system services.

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and Zurich Financial Services have announced a seven-year deal IT outsourcing deal valued at $1.3bn. The deal will involve CSC taking over the development of applications for all Zurich's business processes, including customer service and claims, as well as support services for businesses in the US, UK and Switzerland.

To enable this, 16,000 current Zurich IT employees will be moved over to CSC by the second half of 2005. Zurich provides financial services for the insurance industry.

CSC dropped out of the running for a £2bn BBC outsourcing contract, but also landed a $1.6bn deal with US retailer Sears and renewed an £80m contract with department store BHS.

The Indian IT service providers in the recent times have refrained themselves from announcing any information about the deals won from international clients. This which started as a consequence of heightened backlash against offshoring in the US and UK is still being followed. But as is evident from the recently announced quarterly results, the Indian companies have done well to improve both their top line and bottom line growth. They have been successful in adding new clients and at the same time increased the number of strategic accounts that offer a multi million dollar run rate. In the first quarter of the fiscal 2005, Infosys has managed to add 29 new clients, while Wipro and Satyam have added 32 and 25 new customers respectively.

One other factor that is acting in favor of these leading companies is their presence in the BPO segment. This increases the chances to offer an integrated solution to the prospective clients and offer ample opportunities to cross sell the service. For example, one of the top ten banks in America has chosen Infosys and Progeon as a common supplier of IT and BPO service. Also, out of the 14 active customers of Nipuna, 12 are existing customers of Satyam.

Bharti Tele-Ventures in March entered into a major hardware, software and IT services outsourcing agreement with IBM. Under the terms of the 10-year, $700 million-$750 million agreement, IBM will:

• Manage all of Bharti's customer-facing IT applications, including billing, customer relationship management and data warehousing
• Support Bharti's internal applications, including Internet services, e-mail and online collaboration
• Manage Bharti's IT infrastructure
• Provide disaster recovery services for Bharti
• Support Bharti in delivering voice, data and content-based services

Bank of India has awarded a $150 million IT contract to Hewlett-Packard Systems. HP's outsourcing and system integration experience is said to have been the key differentiator in winning the contract.

Under the terms of the contract, HP will implement and manage a Core Banking Solution (CBS) across 750 branches in India. HP will also implement and manage a datawarehousing and document imaging solution and provide integrated channel management for telebanking, internet banking and ATM systems.