FIFA Signed India's Satyam for 7 Years

You might have heard of FIFA, short for Fédération Internationale de Football Association. It deals with… football. Or soccer, as some know it - the team sport where there are eleven players on the pitch on each side and the ball is only kicked with the foot by all, except the one dressed differently from each team and with gloves in hand, who is allowed to touch it with his hands within certain boundaries.

OK, now that we got that covered we'll go on to the actual piece of news about FIFA, which signed its official IT services provider for the next seven years. As you have read in the title, it's the Satyam Software group from India, which will join global giants such as McDonalds and the US brewer Anheuser-Busch as one of the six World Cup sponsors.

The sponsors form the second tier of FIFA's commercial hierarchy, right behind the six official partners: Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates, Sony, Visa and Hyundai.

The deal, signed on Saturday in Durban, South Africa, has Satyam providing IT support for the upcoming 2010 and 2014 World Cups to be held in South Africa and Brazil, respectively. "This is a momentous day for Satyam, as we pledge to work much more closely with FIFA than we have in the past in the run up to 2010 and 2014," the company's founder and owner B. Ramalinga Raju said after the signing ceremony.

From the other side of the deal, Sepp Blatter, the president of world football's governing body FIFA said that "For the first time in the history of the World Cup, we have a global company from India supporting this biggest sporting event", and he was reportedly very excited about the deal. The value of the contract to FIFA was not disclosed.