TCS, Canoo Engineering AG tie up to promote Canoo's Ultra Light Client (ULC) technology

New Delhi, April 2003 - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Swiss software firm Canoo Engineering AG today announced a partnership that will enable TCS's customers to profit from Canoo's sophisticated Java thin client technology, Ultra Light Client (ULC). Companies today are increasingly deploying business applications using web technology. Often this creates a dilemma between choosing a light browser client with a simple user interface, and a feature-rich fat client showing multiple windows and showing complex data hierarchies by leveraging the underlying windowing platform.

Browser-based technologies are easy to deploy but fall far short in terms of the richness of GUIs and, hence, the user experience. Moreover, using typical browser technologies such as HTML and JavaScript to build interfaces for complex business applications with a high volume of transactional data leads to an unwanted increase in network traffic between client and server. On the other hand, feature-rich fat clients provide rich user experience but are comparatively costly to develop, optimise, deploy, and maintain.

Canoo's unique ULC technology solves these difficult technical problems and renders complicated and highly interactive graphical user interfaces for web-based applications while reducing the development time and deployment effort, as well as greatly improving the utilisation of network bandwidth by reducing network traffic.

TCS and Canoo will jointly promote and deploy ULC-based thin client software architectures. The partnership will provide the current ULC customer base with access to TCS' enormous technology and domain expertise to offer integrated solutions in the realms of finance, telecom, manufacturing, government, and healthcare. The backing of a strong partner such as TCS will help Canoo's customers minimise their investment risk besides reducing solution development and implementation time and cost.

The new partnership will also be a gain for TCS's existing customers, "because not only is TCS involved in a number of projects that can profit from ULC, but it also has the competency to put ULC to good use for the benefit of its customers", explained Canoo CEO Marc Domenig.

"Our cooperation with Canoo to use ULC will enable us to offer new architectures with cutting-edge thin client presentation layers to our customers, which will give them rich user experiences while reducing network utilisation and cost of ownership for a better total value proposition. Besides, as implementers using ULC, we will be able to offer rapid development of stable and scalable ULC applications", said Dr. Gautam Shroff, head of the Architecture and Technology Consulting practice at TCS, stressing the advantages of the venture. "This partnership will enable our customers to use ULC as a strategic product in the future."

About TCS

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) provides end-to-end IT consulting and software services to Fortune 500 clients in over 55 countries. With over 21,000 employees, over 100 branches, alliances with world IT leaders, cutting-edge R&D, and world-class infrastructure, TCS offers products and services in eBusiness, Application Development, Architecture and Technology Consulting, Engineering Services, eSecurity, Large Projects, Quality Consulting and Infrastructure Development, across verticals such as Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, Manufacturing, Retail and Distribution, Transportation, Life Sciences and Healthcare, Government and Utilities. TCS is a SEI-CMM Level 5/P-CMM Level 4 company with a 2001-02 turnover of $880 million. Further information on TCS: www.tcs.com.