The start of the New Year has brought signs of positive change at Nokia, the global communications and IT company whose mobile phones were once dominating all the important markets. First off, the pre-reports for fourth quarter 2012 showed that the company performed better than expected owing to the success of its Lumia and Asha series. Then the company announced a transfer of 820 employees to its partners, HCL and TCS. This will bring down the global IT headcount by 300, significantly streamline operations and cut costs. Continuing down this path of effective steps, Nokia has now appointed Tata Consultancy Services to integrate its internal applications across all offices worldwide.
Indian IT major TCS is reckoned worldwide for services that have helped many global companies refine their internal communications and management. It aims at simplifying business practices and transforming them using latest technology. Currently they have 4500 employees in North and West Europe. Amit Bajaj, the company’s Nordic and Baltic head, was quoted saying that this move is a plus for TCS as well as it confirms the company’s commitment to the Nordic region. Currently, TCS is already engaged with companies like SAS, Ericsson, Telenor and ABB.
The task assigned to TCS includes amalgamation of Nokia’s numerous applications for consumer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, product lifecycle management, enterprise information management, corporate functions and supply chain management. The IT vendor is expected to strategically choose only those applications that truly add value to the process and deliver one program that covers all of them, as well as perfect business practices in some other areas in Nokia’s core business hands. The period of the contract wasn’t mentioned; just that it is going to be long-term.
The stock market had responded favorably to Nokia’s previous announcements and the stock continues to be green even now. In fact, Nokia has beaten Apple’s stock by a large in the last month, with reports that money is flowing from the Silicon Valley titan to Nokia. This is an important teller of Nokia’s way forward, especially since Sprint recently decided to opt for Samsung and HTC Windows Phone 8 devices over Nokia’s Lumia series. This period is crucial to the Finnish phone maker’s story as the smartphone and mobile technologies industry gets more and more congested.
