Indian tech giants are keeping their fingers crossed over the next few days as top outsourcing customers such as  BT, Citi, GE and Bank of America announce $4 billion worth of new contracts.

TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL are all likely to benefit, as customers seek to cope with their tightened information technology budgets by sending work to offshore locations such as India.

One of the bigger contracts likely to come to India is from Australian telco Telstra, which is considering a $250-million outsourcing contract. Other contracts, valued at $100 million are being awarded by Citi, BT and GE.

According to the India Times, new contracts worth almost $4 billion will include long-term application maintenance contracts.

However, it seems that Indian vendors are having to cut their billing rates in a bid to score these contracts. Many larger customers have reduced their IT budgets by up to 10 per cent, and plan to seek more cost and business output-based deliverables from service providers during the recession.

The likes of Best Buy, Visa and Nisaan are attempting to renegotiate their contracts to cut costs. They seem to be following the lead of BT, which renegotiated its contract with Xansa to save around $123 million over the next six years.  On the bonus side, the new deal also got Xansa almost 80 per cent of BT’s overall back-office projects. X