Idea Cellular and IBM Ink a 10 Year Business Transformation Pact

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MUMBAI, INDIA - 21 Mar 2007: International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) and Idea Cellular Ltd. (Idea), a leading Indian GSM mobile services provider and an Aditya Birla Group company, today announced a 10 year business transformation pact to integrate, innovate and transform Idea's business processes and IT infrastructure. The pact is designed on an innovative risk - reward revenue sharing model. It covers all of Idea's existing operations and potential new additions. The 10 year pact, depending upon Idea's business revenues and circle expansion, would size around US$ 600 million to US$ 800 million.

Announcing the pact, Mr. Sanjeev Aga, Managing Director, Idea Cellular Ltd., said, "Idea is focused on innovation led growth. Our partnership with IBM will bring value to our customers, employees and shareholders. We will harness IBM's power to support Idea's explosive growth with robust, best-in-class solutions that address scalability, complexity, innovation and cost control, to provide Idea with the most advanced business processes globally."

Mr. Shanker Annaswamy, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia, said, "IBM will bring its deep global expertise in business transformation and innovation to enable Idea to meet its customer value, business growth and productivity objectives. We are delighted to partner with the Aditya Birla group. This win reinforces IBM's position as a leading partner to global telecommunication companies."

The partnership between Idea and IBM will enable Idea to:

Accelerate time-to-market of new services to delight customers and enhance loyalty
Leverage opportunities from the convergence of voice, data, video and wireless technologies
Add new revenue streams to provide a competitive edge
Empower business with analytics tools for focused market segmentation and cross selling
Improve end-to-end customer management to drive efficiency
Provide advanced revenue assurance capabilities for top and bottom line growth

The pact with IBM will enable Idea to meet the needs of its 14 million current subscribers and future growth. This will be through supporting end to end transformation of business critical processes including billing, revenue assurance, and credit collection, subscriber management, business intelligence, fraud management, customer relationship management, e-billing and payment, and customer self care. IBM will also undertake the management and support of Idea's IT Infrastructure. All IT department employees of Idea would play a key role in the transformation, either as Idea employees or as IBM employees.