Satyam lands FIFA contracts

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 03 Aug 2007

FIFA, the world soccer body, has awarded Indian IT giant Satyam two multimillion-dollar contracts to "support FIFA and its major forthcoming events".

The $1.4 billion company declined to say whether the "major forthcoming events" included FIFA's 2009 Confederations Cup and the 2010 World Cup, but company sources recently confirmed to ITWeb that this is the case.

The contracts will see Satyam, India's fourth-largest IT company, develop and implement a customised event management system for FIFA in the next 12 months, as well as an Extranet and Intranet. Satyam's partnership will also include full, uninterrupted support for both solutions for FIFA, until the final whistle of each game.

Working primarily from FIFA's Zurich headquarters, Satyam will provide in-country support for matches. It will also have teams work from offshore locations to enable lower costs and optimised CMM (capability maturity model) Level 5 quality.

No downtime

"Clearly, FIFA organises incredibly large-scale, high-profile tournaments. In fact, we host the world's most widely-viewed sporting events, with as many as 28 billion people [in aggregate] watching the 2006 tournament. As such, we cannot afford even a second's downtime, even during the huge usage spikes throughout games," says FIFA head of IT solutions Michael Kelly.

"That is why we have chosen the reliability, flexibility, and reusability of Satyam's applications. This is the start of a long-term relationship that will see Satyam working closely with FIFA over the next few years."

Satyam's European head of operations Keshab Panda says the company is delighted to have won the bid. "We are committed to ensuring the success of managing its event logistics and Extranets/Intranet platforms," Panda adds.

Satyam has had a presence in SA since 2005 and is aggressively recruiting and training local IT graduates. It has this year already recruited and trained 42 specialists, and another 100 are going to India next month for a company entry-level training programme.

The company employs 42 500 professionals in engineering and product development, supply chain management, client relationship management, business process quality, business intelligence, enterprise integration, and infrastructure management, among other key capabilities.