Tata Communications, a leading provider of enterprise data services, today announced that Tata Communications' On-Demand CRM service is available immediately to organizations of all sizes in India. This marks the company's entry into the fast growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) space and is an extension of its managed services portfolio. Tata Communications has signed a partnership agreement with SugarCRM, a leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, to provide its award-winning CRM applications as the basis for Tata's entry as a SaaS provider. Since the beginning of this year, Tata Communications and SugarCRM have worked closely together on a joint pilot program to build a CRM service that meets the needs of businesses in India.

Building on its world class network, data center and managed hosting services, Tata Communications is bringing enterprises in India a single, end-to-end service to help companies manage their marketing programs in a cohesive manner, increase effectiveness of sales teams, and provide stronger tools to their customer support teams. With Tata's On-Demand CRM offering, companies can get up and running quickly without having to invest in additional IT resources and can pay for the CRM service on a subscription model. The subscription service aligns with the growth and needs of individual businesses and delivers a cost-effective avenue for using CRM services. With Tata Communications' pan India sales and support presence, and its SI partner eco-system, On-Demand CRM will help grow businesses as per the market needs.

Tata Communications' managed services portfolio now extends beyond network, infrastructure, security and collaboration services into the application space to enable them to transform the way they operate their businesses. On-Demand CRM, enables companies in India to more effectively manage their customer relationships and increase business effectiveness and profitability. This adds to the existing Hosted Business Messaging (based on Microsoft Exchange) that Tata Communications has been offering for the last three years, and will be part of the broader SaaS offerings, including Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS).

The company made this announcement before the trading hours today 04 November 2009.