Noida-based IT company HCL Technologies has bagged an over-$600 million deal from Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson. HCL under this agreement will provide infrastructure management, cloud and application services to Ericsson. The contract is for five years.

The deal, which was earlier split and executed by several vendors, has been fused by Ericsson under HCL. TCS was the other strong contender in the running for the deal, sources told the Times of India.

UK research firm Omdia recently said that 56 deals worth $13.9 billion in the telecom space will come up for renewal between now and December (2020).

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Hansa Iyengar, principal analyst at Omdia told the publication that “most of the deals are concentrated in the EMEA and APAC regions” adding that IBM is the “major incumbent in these deals, followed by Nokia Networks”.

She further added that “most of these are infrastructure deals” signed 7-10 years ago and “will likely involve a complete infrastructure refresh and a significant apps portion as well”.

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Tech Mahindra, in 2019, had won an over $1 billion deal from AT&T Communications. It was Tech Mahindra’s largest-ever deal, bigger than that with British Telecom, with which it had a long association.

The telecom space is getting a lot of attention as early 5G adopters will benefit from time efficiency and speed to provide a host of services to their clients.

According to the latest forecast by US-based research firm Gartner, revenue from 5G infrastructure is expected to almost double worldwide in 2020 to hit $8.1 billion, from what was spent over the course of 2019.

The firm added that this would open up several newer opportunities for IT service providers. Gartner also stated that 5G will account for around 21 per cent of total infrastructure revenue in 2020, up from 10.4 per cent in 2019.

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