Handset maker Nokia has outsourced its desktop maintenance and support in 76 countries to IT services firm HCL Technologies in a

multi-million dollar contract spread over five years, starting this April. The deal also involves transfer of employees from Nokia.
The contract will be serviced from HCL's centres in India, China, Po-land, Finland and US. It involves providing multi-lingual helpdesk services in 13 languages, creating and maintaining new user accounts, and workstation management and security. The value of the contract and the number of employees being transferred to HCL Technologies was not disclosed.

The contract is being moved from Nokia's existing vendors. HCL said it had won the deal against competition from global and Indian players.
"This is one of the largest IT infrastructure management deals in the global arena. We will be setting up a 100-person centre in Finland to service Nokia and our other customers in Nordic countries," HCL Technologies Infrastructure Services Division (ISD) Europe senior VP Pradeep Bindal told ET from London.

HCL Technologies, through its subsidiary HCL ISD, has been an early mover in providing infrastructure management services. The Nokia deal is part of the $1 billion worth of contracts that the company won in the October-December '08 quarter.

Infrastructure management deals, which involve taking over assets such as data centres and workstations, are typically much larger since the value of the asset is also included in the deal value. However, the profit margins in these deals are lower. Mr Bindal said HCL's contract with Nokia was a pure services deal and did not include any asset transfer. Billing will be based on the number of workstations and other devices that require to be supported as well as parameters such as number of helpdesk requests, he added.