About Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS)

About Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS)

Information

Type: Public (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS)
Industry: IT services IT consulting
Founded: 1968
Founder(s): JRD Tata
Headquarters: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Area served: Worldwide
Key people: Ratan Tata (Chairman), S Ramadorai (VC), N. Chandrasekaran (CEO & MD)
Products: TCS Bancs, Digital Certification Products, Healthcare Management Systems Services: Outsourcing, BPO, Software Products
Revenue: US$ 8.2 billion (2011)
Profit: US$ 1.9 billion (2011)
Total assets: US$ 6.084 billion (2010)
Total equity: US$ 4.181 billion (2010)
Employees: 2,00,000+ (April 2011)
Parent: Tata Group
Website: TCS.com

Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is an Indian IT services, business solutions and outsourcing company headquartered in Mumbai, India. TCS is the largest provider of information technology in Asia and second largest provider of business process outsourcing services in India. TCS has offices in 47 countries with more than 142 branches across the globe. The company is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange of India.

TCS is one of the operative subsidiaries of one of India's largest and oldest conglomerate company, the Tata Group or Tata Sons Limited, which has interests in areas such as energy, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing, chemicals, engineering, materials, government and healthcare.

History

It began as the "Tata Computer Centre", for the company Tata Group whose main business was to provide computer services to other group companies. F C Kohli was the first general manager. J. R. D. Tata was the first chairman, followed by pankaj roy.

One of TCS' first assignments was to provide punched card services to a sister concern, Tata Steel (then TISCO). It later bagged the country's first software project, the Inter-Branch Reconciliation System (IBRS) for the Central Bank of India. It also provided bureau services to Unit Trust of India, thus becoming one of the first companies to offer BPO services.

In the early 1970s, Tata Consultancy Services started exporting its services. The company pioneered the global delivery model for IT services with its first offshore client in 1974. TCS's first international order came from Burroughs, one of the first business computer manufacturers. TCS was assigned to write code for the Burroughs machines for several US-based clients. This experience also helped TCS bag its first onsite project - the Institutional Group & Information Company (IGIC), a data centre for ten banks, which catered to two million customers in the US, assigned TCS the task of maintaining and upgrading its computer systems.

In 1981, TCS set up India's first software research and development centre, the Tata Research Development and Design Center (TRDDC) in Pune. The first client-dedicated offshore development center was set up for Compaq (then Tandem) in 1985.
In 1979, TCS delivered an electronic depository and trading system called SECOM for SIS SegaInterSettle, Switzerland. It was by far the most complex project undertaken by an Indian IT company. TCS followed this up with System X for the Canadian Depository System and also automated the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE).TCS associated with a Swiss partner, TKS Teknosoft, which it later acquired.

In the early 1990s, the Indian IT outsourcing industry grew tremendously due to the Y2K bug and the launch of a unified European currency, Euro. TCS pioneered the factory model for Y2K conversion and developed software tools which automated the conversion process and enabled third-party developers and clients to make use of it.

In 1999, TCS saw outsourcing opportunity in E-Commerce and related solutions and set up its E-Business division with ten people. By 2004, E-Business was contributing half a billion dollars (US) to TCS.

On 9 August 2004, TCS became a publicly listed company, much later than its rivals, Infosys, Wipro and Mahindra Satyam.

During 2005, TCS ventured into a new area for an Indian IT services company - Bioinformatics.

In 2008, the company went through an internal restructuring exercise that executives claim would bring about agility to the organization.

In 2011, the company entered the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) market with cloud-based offerings.

Indian branches

TCS had development centres and/or regional offices in the following Indian cities: Ahmedabad, Baroda, Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Coimbatore, Goa, Gurgaon, Kochi, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Mangalore, Noida, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Hyderabad.

Global units

Africa: South Africa, Morocco
Asia (Outside India): Bahrain, Beijing, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, UAE (Dubai)
Australia: Australia
Europe: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
North America: Canada, Mexico, USA
South America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru

Innovation and R&D

Tata Research Development and Design Center

TCS established the first software research center in India, the Tata Research Development and Design Center, in Pune, India in 1981. TRDDC undertakes research in Software Engineering, Process Engineering and Systems Research.

Researchers at TRDDC also developed Master-Craft (now called TCS Code Generator Framework) a Model Driven Development software that can automatically create code based on a model of a software, and rewrite the code based on the user's needs.
Research at TRDDC has also resulted in the development of Sujal, a low-cost water purifier that can be manufactured using locally available resources. TCS deployed thousands of these filters in the Indian Ocean Tsunami disaster of 2004 as part of its relief activities. This product has been marketed in India as Tata swach, a low cost water purifier.

Innovation

In 2007, TCS launched its Co-Innovation Network, a network of TCS Innovation Labs, startup alliances, University Research Departments, and venture capitalists.
In addition to TRDDC, TCS has 19 Innovation Labs based in three countries.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Convergence: Content management and delivery, convergence engines, networks such as 3G, WiMax, WiMesh, IP Testing for Quality of Service, IMS, OSS/BSS systems, and others.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Delhi: Software Architectures, Software as a Service, natural language processing, text, data and process analytics, multimedia applications and graphics.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Embedded Systems: Medical electronics, WiMAX, and WLAN technologies.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Hyderabad: Computational methods in life sciences, meta-genomics, systems biology, e-security, smart card-based applications, Linux and open source,digital media protection, nano-biotechnology, quantitative finance.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Mumbai: Speech and natural language processing, wireless systems and wireless applications.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Insurance - Chennai: IT Optimization, Business Process Optimization, Customer Centricity Enablers, Enterprise Mobility, Telematics, Text Analytics, 2D Barcodes, Mashups, Innovation in Product Development and Management (PLM) for Insurance.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Chennai: Infrastructure innovation, green computing, Web 2.0 and next-generation user interfaces.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Peterborough, England: New-wave communications for the enterprises, utility computing and RFID (chips, tags, labels, readers and middleware).
• TCS Innovation Lab: Performance Engineering, Mumbai: Performance management, high performance technology components, and others.
• TCS Innovation Lab, Cincinnati, United States: Engineering and Manufacturing IT solutions.

Some of the assets created by TCS Innovation Labs are DBProdem, Jensor, Wanem, Scrutinet

In 2008, the TCS Innovation Lab-developed product, mKrishi, won the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in the Wireless category. mKrishi is a service that would enable India's farmers to receive useful data on an inexpensive mobile device.

TCS' Co-Innovation Network partners include Collabnet, Cassatt, MetricStream, academic institutions such as Stanford, MIT, various IITs, and venture capitalists like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.