Indian firm wins US city deal

MUMBAI: Goldstone Technologies Ltd has won a small contract from a city in California to migrate financial applications to modern computer systems, boosting its shares by more than six percent.

The contract with the city of Oakland comes amid a fierce debate in the United States about outsourcing contracts to Indian companies and reports of proposed California state legislation to make it tougher for certain work to be shipped abroad.

However, the contract with Goldstone, based in Secunderabad , will be handled out of its U.S. office and carried out on site.

It involves the migration of applications running on aging IBM computers to applications running on Sun Microsystems servers compliant with Sun's J2EE platform, according to a statement to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE).

"It is a long-term contract, but the initial phase, which will run for 5-6 months, is worth about half a million dollars," Chalapathi Rao, chief administrative officer of Goldstone, informed.

He said the project, initially involving 12-15 Goldstone employees out of its Virginia office, would be implemented on site in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco. Goldstone was in negotiations for other government contracts too, he added.

© Reuters