The Hindu Business Line : Ten cos in fray for BSNL’s Rs 4,000-cr project

New Delhi, Oct 1 As many as 10 IT majors including HCL, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Infosys, Satyam and Prithvi Communications have put in their bids for the Rs 4000-crore project for providing billing and software solutions to State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

BSNL had invited bids for setting up operations support systems (OSS) and business support system (BSS) software. OSS and BSS solutions are designed to help service providers achieve superior customer service and rapid time to market for new products and services. The role of Business Support Systems in a service provider is to cover four main areas of product management, customer management, revenue management and order management. This also includes the billing software which tracks the duration of calls and the charges.

Aimed at expansion

This project is part of BSNL’s plans to expand its cellular network to offer services to 93 million more subscribers. The project has been divided into 4 zones and the lowest bidder in each area will be given the contract.

The company which wins the contract stands to earn Rs 1000 crore for each zone. HCL, Tech Mahindra and TCS have bid for all the four zones. The contract is expected to be awarded in 2 months.

While HCL and TCS are providing the billing solution to BSNL’s existing mobile network, Tech Mahindra is betting on its global expertise to win the contract.

The bids will be first evaluated by a technical committee before the financial details are unveiled. Global players including Comverse, Convergys, HP, EMC, Juniper and Oracle have partnered with the Indian IT companies to bid for the project.

Separate bids

This is the first time that BSNL has invited separate bids from IT solutions providers.

Earlier this part of the project was built into the overall GSM contract. For example in the previous contract Ericsson was given the mandate to integrate all part of a mobile network including base stations, hardware equipment and the software. This was done to make it easy for BSNL to negotiate with just one company for the entire project.

However, it had also led to some controversy since the companies which won the bid would eventually change the software solutions provider in a bid to maximise earnings.

Four parts

Therefore to steer clear of any more controversy this time, BSNL has divided its 93 million line expansion contract into four parts. Part 1 includes setting up network for GSM based 2G mobile services.

The second part involves rolling out third generation (3G) network.

The third segment will be awarded to companies which can set up the passive infrastructure including towers, power generation rooms and other basic equipment required for a cell site. BSNL has received good response for all the three parts.

The bidding for the fourth part related to software and billing took place on Tuesday for which the 10 companies have put in their bids. The bids will be evaluated at the zonal level instead of the earlier practice wherein the BSNL headquarters decided on these projects. Some of the companies expressed concern that BSNL may not have enough technical expertise at the zonal level to evaluate such a big project.

BSNL officials, however, said that it had enough telecom officers and they had handled similar projects earlier.

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