All Roads Lead to Bangalore

Even outsourcers are outsourcing. Fidelity National Information Services (FNIS), a technology provider to the financial and real estate industries, signed an outsourcing contract with Covansys (Farmington Hills, Mich.), a technology consulting and services company with offshore development centers in India. FNIS is a subsidiary of Fidelity National Financial (FNF; Jacksonville, Fla.).

But it's more than just an outsourcing deal. FNIS will take a 29 percent stake in Covansys, which expects incremental revenues of $150 million over the next five years from the deal, according to its press release.

To begin, Covansys will help FNIS to integrate all of its recent acquisitions, including Sanchez, Alltel Information Services, Aurum, Bancware and Pro-Soft. "We'll be training our people both in the U.S. and India on all the FNF products," says Raj Vattikuti, co-chairman and founder of Covansys.

According to Vattikuti, Covansys will contribute its technology expertise to the partnership so that FNIS can remain focused on the business side. "They have very strong industry knowledge and the customer relationships and product management," he says. "Behind that, we bring large teams of people quickly, and with that, the knowledge of their products."

Covansys will help to re-engineer FNIS' product line to work on a Web services architecture using IBM WebSphere and J2EE. Additionally, Covansys will help FNIS' financial services customers with their integration efforts, including consolidation of multiple loan origination systems, as well as services outsourcing.

"The floodgate is open," says Vattikuti. "We're getting a lot of requests, so we're trying to make sure we get the core team established, both here and in India."