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Adith Charlie

Mumbai, June 10 The country’s largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services, achieved cost savings of $26 million (about Rs 125 crore) last fiscal thanks to in-house R&D.

This was over twice as much the roughly $12 million (Rs 57 crore) saved in 2007-08.

“The CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and R&D go-to-market team were able to influence customers and facilitate business wins in several verticals.

The past R&D efforts of the company have resulted in the sale of software licences and usage of these licences internally, yielding savings of $26 million,” TCS said in its 2008-09 annual report.

A bulk of the savings was achieved by deploying internally developed software tools which helped reduce the overall time for software writing in addition to improving productivity and efficiency, Mr Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer, told Business Line in an e-mail response.

TCS has developed several such tools in software engineering, infrastructure management, analytics etc which facilitate functions such as requirement analysis, testing, standards checking, embedded code analysis and survey analysis. In developing these tools in-house, the software major also saves on licensing costs associated with procuring them from outside vendors.

For 2008-09, TCS reduced software licences costs by 9.1 per cent to Rs 423.51 crore from Rs 466.23 crore in FY 2008.

Some research offerings developed by the company are also deployed at customers’ premises.

“We also co-innovate with customers to create customised research based solutions,” said Mr Krishnan. “We expect our software licences and in-house deployment of tools to increase savings this year,” he added.

Going forward, the company is expected to continue investing in technologies that enhance productivity and operational efficiencies.

“Cloud and ubiquity computing will gain focus. Energy, life sciences and security domains will be domains of prime importance,” it said in its annual report.

TCS spends about 0.2 per cent of its income on R&D annually, which analysts say, is “small for a $6-billion entity”.

More Stories on : Software | Research & Development | Tata Consultancy Services Ltd

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