Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a global information technology services and consulting company with headquarters in Mumbai, India. With its deep expertise in digital and business solutions, engineering, and IT infrastructure services, TCS has been providing world-class services and consulting to clients, consistently delivering transformational results for over five decades. In 2023, TCS was selected to FORTUNE® magazine’s list of the World’s Most Admired Companies. Regarded as a barometer of corporate reputation, the list is based on a survey of business executives, directors and analysts from around the world. TCS employs 600,000 people globally and has 150 offices in 46 countries.

The IBM and TCS partnership

IBM and TCS have a global collaboration that spans various technologies, industries and geographies. Our longstanding partnership of more than 48 years enjoys the benefits of IBM’s expertise in cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics along with TCS’s experience in digital transformation, consulting and cloud-engineering services. This collaboration enables clients to leverage both technical capabilities and transformational services to solve complex problems and create additional value.

TCS has a dedicated IBM practice with many employees who work on IBM technologies and over 400 engagements with extensive expertise in managing Power infrastructure and workloads, including successfully migrating Power workloads to IBM Power Virtual Server. TCS also has more than 25 years of experience in managing IBM i and AIX workloads for its customers, with over 3,500 associates having IBM i expertise and over 8,500 associates having AIX expertise, providing services that include application development and maintenance, re-engineering, migration, screen scraping and web enablement. TCS’s expertise in the Power platform space, dedicated IBM i and AIX Centre of Excellence and SME community make them a trusted partner for migration.

“IBM and TCS hold a long-term strategic partnership. As enterprises are seeing a lot of uptick in migrating workloads to cloud, IBM has created a space for itself amongst the many hyperscalers out in the market in terms of their Power Virtual server and Financial Services cloud offerings. Moving some of the AS400 and AIX workloads to Power Virtual Server platform is proving to be really beneficial and optimal for enterprises.” — Babu Unnikrishnan, CTO, Business Group at TCS

Financial institution reduces IT infrastructure spending by USD 300,000 annually

Financial institutions have complex regulatory, compliance and security requirements, in addition to specific user expectations. Meeting these requirements necessitates a meticulous focus on architecture, controls and testing. The banking sector operates within highly intricate and sensitive IT and application environments, and both IBM and TCS possess the expertise to handle regulatory-driven requirements of this nature. Accomplishing such projects and workloads requires precision, diligence and substantial experience.

TCS and IBM have partnered to assist clients in accelerating their digital transformation and delivering better business outcomes. We worked with a UK-based financial institution that sought to reduce the cost and improve the disaster-recovery capabilities of their on-prem infrastructure. This infrastructure was limiting the client’s ability to meet user and market demands. The client approached TCS to modernize their AS400 environment and move their data and applications to a new cloud-based infrastructure while maintaining the same Citrix network access for users.

TCS and IBM collaborated closely to address the challenge presented by the client. Within four weeks, the teams completed a proof of concept (POC), which was approved by the customer. TCS then signed a three-year agreement to use IBM Power Virtual Server and IBM Cloud. Working closely with IBM, the TCS team established a new environment (IBM i, Windows, Citrix, Network) in IBM Cloud, thoroughly tested the solution and successfully migrated the client’s data and application solutions to IBM Cloud.

The project has had a significant impact on the client’s business. In addition to improved system and application performance compared to the previous on-premises environment, the client substantially improved their disaster-recovery (DR) posture, which included a new active DR capability. In addition, the client was able to reduce their annual infrastructure spending by over USD 300,000 and IBM iSeries capacity by 40%.

They also gained new capabilities to scale up and down their development, test and DR environments based on daily demand requirements. Furthermore, they met or exceeded all existing latency performance and high-availability requirements for their users. Finally, the client experienced enhancements in security, resiliency, capacity and energy efficiency as a result of migrating their workloads to IBM Power Virtual Server.

In addition, the TCS team was able to manage inbound and outbound networking using IBM Direct Link and improve the client’s storage and archive retrieval posture by converting on-prem physical tape stores to virtual tape.

North American retailer saves 450,000 USD annually

When a North American-based retailer wanted to move their applications to the cloud and take advantage of a more flexible and responsive infrastructure, TCS and IBM collaborated effectively to migrate the client’s AS400 infrastructure to IBM Power Virtual Server, demonstrating another successful example of the partnership in action.

This resulted in significant benefits for the client, including an annual cost saving of USD 450,000 USD and a 30% decrease in iSeries capacity by upgrading from Power 7 to Power 9. The greatest advantage was seen in the storage options, as IBM Power Virtual Server provided faster, more cost-effective and unrestricted storage capacity on demand compared to the existing on-premises storage that was due for replacement, bringing about improved overall performance.

“Without question, TCS and the large North American retailer team were instrumental for one of the largest migrations of the customer’s AS400 system from on-premises to IBM Power Virtual Server, thereby responsible for a successful adoption and expansion of IBM Cloud. The migration was seamless and resulted in good cost savings and better utilization of the AS400 cores by leveraging Power 9.” — Sureshkumar J, TCS iSeries Chief Architect for a large North American retailer that implemented Power Virtual Server

Getting started

IBM and TCS have a strong and successful partnership that brings expertise, commitment, and collaborative experience to stay ahead of the curve in technology, innovation and cloud engineering services, resulting in outstanding outcomes for clients. If your business is struggling with aging infrastructure, inflexible applications, high IT costs, increasing complexity or failure to meet customer demands, contact IBM and TCS to start your transformation journey today.