How TCS' cloud services platform iON has now become the pre-eminent platform for conducting exams

MUMBAI: Tata Consultancy Services' iON cloud platform, which failed to live up to its initial expectations of revolutionising the small-and-medium business space by offering them computing capabilities at a low cost, has taken on a new life almost five years after its launch. It's now the preeminent platform for conducting examinations in the country.

"iON has about Rs 1,000 crore ($158 million) in revenue now. It could become a separate unit because it has an entirely different way of working," a TCS executive with knowledge of the platform told ET.

This is nowhere near what the company had targeted when it launched iON in 2011 — reaching $1 billion in annual revenues in five years — as it expected small and medium businesses to jump on to the platform. It was not to be.

"iON had a number of target sectors — it focused on education, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and wellness and even textile. But after the initial push, there were troubles with the growth - it needed constant promotional activity," said another TCS executive who worked on iON.

"Education was a bright spot. Mid-2012, the exam functionality was improved and then that took off," the person said.

And it continues to gain.

The Mumbai-headquartered company last year bagged a five-year contract to conduct the Common Aptitude Test (CAT), the gateway to the Indian Institutes of Management and over 150 other business schools in the country, beating six other bidders including US-based incumbent Prometric.

The TCS contract was worth $5 million, or about Rs 31 crore, while the previous five-year contract for administering the entrance exam was worth $40 million, according to website mbauniverse. com.

TCS also administers several other exams, including the All India Engineering Entrance Exam, the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering, the IIT-Joint Entrance Exams, and recruitment exams for Life Insurance Corporation of India, using the iON platform.

"Our assessment engine is today the platform of choice for all the leading competitive exams in the country, and was used to assess 30 million candidates last year," TCS chief executive N Chandrasekaran said in a keynote address at Morgan Stanley Annual India Summit in June.

The number of candidates being assessed is set to soar further.

Earlier this year, TCS won a pilot that could overshadow the rest of its contracts: Indian Railways, the country's largest employer, will soon conduct its recruitment examinations on the platform in a test run.

"We are running a pilot with TCS to make the recruitment process more streamlined. Applications are already being done online but now the exams will also be done online to prevent problems," said an executive with the railway recruitment board who requested anonymity because the person is not an authorised spokesperson of the railways.

Multiple calls to Amitabha Khare, executive director of the railway recruitment board, went unanswered.

TCS declined to comment for this story saying that it was in its silent period before it announces its first-quarter results on July 9.

iON still accounts for only a minuscule of TCS' revenues which stood at about $15.5 billion, or about Rs 97,850 crore, last fiscal. But the company's chief executive has alluded to the need to think about different structures for the company's varied businesses.

"No structure is permanent, it has to evolve, but at the same time we should not make changes for the sake of making changes. If the cloud platforms all grow large and gain revenue, there has to be a different structure for the cloud platforms. If a certain area of the business becomes headcount intensive, and others become less intensive then they will need different structures," Chandrasekaran had told ET in an interview in April. iON is also being handled differently inside TCS, he had said.