The Wal-Mart Stores has been selected for an outsourcing contract worth up to $500 million over next few years by including TCS, Infosys and Wipro, as the retailer seeks to award multiple contracts for managing its business applications and other back office activities.

Wal-Mart has been testing the waters by outsourcing smaller projects to companies such as Infosys, TCS and Wipro. Wal-Mart’s outsourcing is more about globalizing its information technology sourcing initiatives. At a time when most companies are struggling to grow their business, Wal-Mart announced $15 billion share buy-back program earlier this month, as the retailer continues to woo more customers. Officials at Wipro, TCS and Infosys declined to offer any comments about the Wal-Mart contract.

As per Sources Most of the world’s top retailer have been outsourcing projects to Indian third party service providers, including TCS and Infosys, apart from their own captive centres in order to support their existing IT systems and also develop newer applications. Tesco for instance, saves over $60 million every year by outsourcing its IT projects to India.

Wal-Mart is already has a joint venture Bharti, so, this will be natural for the retailer to explore various ways of leveraging its Indian presence. Apart this wal-Mart also doing IT and back office projects is not expected to impact local US jobs. In fact earlier to this month Wal-Mart announced that it will add around 22,000 new jobs in the US by adding over 150 new stores to its existing network of around 7,900 retail outlets.

Malvika Saxena/ITvoir Network