Ericsson up for Bharti outsourcing

Swedish vendor Ericsson is reportedly leading the race for a contract worth an estimated $2 billion for the increase of Indian mobile network operator Bharti Airtel's 2G network in 15 circles, says Tele Geography.

Bharti, which recently announced it had inked a $700 million network outsourcing deal with Finland's Nokia Siemens Networks, is expected to formally unveil this latest deal soon, and with Ericsson already managing and maintaining the telco's infrastructure in the regions in question, the Swedish outfit is thought to be one of the most likely companies to bag the contract.

Should the reports prove true, it would be Ericsson's third large-scale deal with Bharti, with the two having previously inked two outsourcing deals, with the most recent in July 2007 also worth around $2 billion.

Asian companies are becoming just as likely to outsource their IT as US or European companies. As a result, spending on IT outsourcing in China is expected to explode over the next several years, with India being the main beneficiary, reports TMCnet.

Dell Services predicts that spending on IT outsourcing will grow faster among Asian companies than their western counterparts in 2010.

This is a reversal of the trend of recent years that has seen more western companies outsourcing services from India and China.

Spirit AeroSystems gave employees details of the second wave of a plan to outsource some IT functions, says Kansas.com.

The employees work in some areas of network, infrastructure, applications and deskside support. Spirit workers will be offered jobs with IBM or Hewlett Packard - the vendors taking over the IT work - or offered other jobs within the company, says Spirit spokesman, Ken Evans.

"Currently we are not structured to support the global IT requirements, so change is required," the company says. "This means prioritising our IT core competencies - which ones provide a competitive advantage and should be grown in-house and which ones should be sourced through vendors with those specialties."