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Software exporter HCL Technologies on Monday said it has bagged a 350-million-dollar IT outsourcing services deal from media and marketing house Readers Digest Association. The complex transformational engagement will cover the end-to-end IT landscape of RDA from IT infrastructure to applications.

"IT is a key enabler to our business. We expect that HCL will bring down cost of operations significantly, while improving services and bringing cutting-edge technology and capabilities to transform our IT functionality and service," said Al Perruzza, senior vice-president, global operations, IT and business redesign, RDA.

As part of the engagement, HCL Technologies would provide application development and infrastructure support across the application stack of Oracle, open technologies, main frame, infrastructure support for network, security, storage, end user computing and data centres, HCL said in a statement.

Applauding the win, Som Mittal, president of the IT industry body, Nasscom said, "We congratulate HCL for this landmark engagement". Mittal added, "This deal reinforces the fact how global sourcing helps economies to take advantage of the talent and new opportunities, which will help revive the current economic situation."

The recessionary environment in many economies of the world, especially the US and Europe, has forced global corporations to squeeze their IT spending with a complete freeze on budgets in certain cases. With the situation worsening, Indian IT companies are coming by very few large-size contracts along with significant pricing pressures on existing contracts. Apart from the sheer size of the deal, the present market scenario adds to the significance of the deal.

As per the quarterly results of the company, HCL had two clients with revenues contribution of over a $100 million. The $2 billion company has around 315 active clients. "RDA partnership is a unique service offering in which HCL blends all its outsourcing strengths applications and infrastructure capabilities, industry knowledge, and global reach, to help RDA achieve fundamental transformation at the enterprise level," said Sanjeev Nikore, corporate vice-president, HCL Technologies.