en.Wedoany.com Reported - India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has signed a multi-million dollar, multi-year cooperation agreement with Swiss-Swedish industrial technology group ABB. Under ABB's "Future Network Model" initiative, TCS will design, integrate, and operate the network ecosystem covering ABB's global operations, unifying local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), and software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs). It will build a centrally managed network operations system and configure cybersecurity and end-to-end monitoring capabilities. TCS disclosed that the project will continue to advance over the next five years.
The core of this initiative is to transform ABB's currently fragmented enterprise network environment into a standardized, centrally managed, and scalable global digital infrastructure. TCS will expand from its existing infrastructure and application management services to end-to-end operations of ABB's global network, adopting a Network-as-a-Service model to uniformly handle network design, system integration, operations, maintenance, and service delivery.
According to the construction plan, TCS will consolidate ABB's multi-vendor network environment across different countries and business regions. Network systems previously supported by different equipment, platforms, and service providers will be integrated into a unified operational architecture to reduce disparities in network standards, management processes, and service quality. TCS will be responsible for coordinating various network equipment and service resources, enabling ABB's global business locations to operate under unified standards.
The project will establish a centralized control framework, integrating service integration and management systems, a global network operations center (NOC), cybersecurity capabilities, and various enterprise networks into a single operational system. The global NOC will handle tasks such as network status monitoring, fault identification, resource scheduling, and operations management, providing continuous network support for ABB's business systems across different regions.
In terms of basic network transformation, the project will upgrade ABB's existing LAN, WAN, and SD-WAN systems. LANs primarily connect terminals and systems within factories, offices, and other business locations; WANs handle data transmission between different regions; and SD-WANs are used for unified configuration and scheduling of cross-regional network resources. After the integration of these three network types, a more unified connectivity architecture will be established among ABB's global business nodes.
TCS will also deploy end-to-end network monitoring and automated orchestration functions to centrally manage the operational status of ABB's various network services. Artificial intelligence will be applied to network operations processes, automatically identifying anomalies, analyzing network status, and optimizing resource allocation to improve fault handling and service response efficiency. The focus of this component is not merely adding AI applications, but leveraging automation to transform the operational mode of the global network.
Cybersecurity infrastructure is also a critical part of this transformation. TCS will embed security capabilities into ABB's global network architecture, providing unified protection for network connections, infrastructure, and operational processes to enhance security standards and compliance levels across different business regions. The project will also strengthen network resilience, mitigating the impact of local equipment, circuit, or service anomalies on the continuity of global business operations.
ABB operates globally in electrification and automation, employing approximately 110,000 people. Factories, R&D institutions, offices, and business systems located in different countries need to exchange data via the enterprise network. This upgrade of global network infrastructure will establish a unified foundation for connectivity, monitoring, and security management for these business nodes.
TCS and ABB have been collaborating for 20 years. They have previously completed several enterprise information infrastructure projects, including integrating ABB's fragmented enterprise resource planning software onto a unified SAP platform and advancing cloud infrastructure migration and applications. This "Future Network Model" project extends the scope of their cooperation from enterprise software and cloud services to the construction and operation of global network infrastructure.
Currently, both parties have not disclosed the specific contract amount, the number of countries and business locations involved, the scale of network nodes, or the equipment procurement list. Based on the announced construction content, the project will be implemented progressively, focusing on the global NOC, centralized control platform, multi-vendor network integration, LAN and WAN upgrades, SD-WAN deployment, and cybersecurity system construction.
