Tata Consultancy Services
More info
- Released
- 1968
- Owner
- Tata Group (majority)
- Type
- IT services company
TCS: India's oldest and largest IT services company, one branch of a conglomerate that also makes steel, salt and trucks.
It began in 1968 in Bombay as Tata Computer Systems, an in-house data processing unit of the Tata Group. Under F. C. Kohli, often called the father of the Indian IT industry, it started sending programmers to clients abroad in the 1970s, partly through a tie-up with Burroughs. The model was dismissively known as "body shopping" — renting out heads, not selling products.
The heads turned out to be an excellent business. TCS listed in 2004 and is among India's most valuable companies, with more than 600,000 employees. Its customers are banks, insurers and government agencies that would rather outsource their mainframes than teach new people COBOL.