The Reader's Digest Association (RDA) has signed a seven-year IT outsourcing deal with HCL Technologies. The value of the agreement is estimated to be approximately US $350 million.

Under the terms of the agreement, HCL will be responsible for supporting infrastructure and development across RDA’s Oracle applications, ‘Open Technologies’ and its mainframe. Services will include infrastructure support for network, security, storage, end user computing and data centers (DC) including disaster recovery. HCL is also tasked with optimising and consolidating existing applications and updating necessary legacy IT to modernize RDA's IT environment.

The global engagement will be delivered from HCL's centres in Poland, US and India and supported by an onsite support network. As part of the agreement number of employees will also transfer to HCL.

Al Perruzza, Senior Vice President for Global Operations, IT and Business Redesign for RDA, commented, "IT is a key enabler to our business. We expect that HCL will bring down cost of operations significantly, while improving services and bringing cutting-edge technology and capabilities to transform our IT functionality and service. We look forward to a long relationship of mutual trust with them."