Former officials of Oracle's Indian subsidiary have come together to bid for the company's services business, in a transaction that has the potential to become India's largest management buyout. About 25-30 people, who were part of the management team of the erstwhile i-flex-now called Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS)-have put together a bid backed by a financial investor for the company, two people familiar with the process said.

The bid is one of the two being considered by Oracle and the deal is in the final stages of evaluation, one person said. The other bidder is multinational IT services vendor CapGemini. Oracle, a software goliath that has an empire extending from technology such as Sun servers and Java to enterprise software products such as Peoplesoft and JD Edwards, is not focussed on services. OFSS is the only services business it owns globally. Since its acquisition, the services business has seen high employee turnover- some of it voluntary and some involuntary because of downsizing. As a percentage of revenues, OFSS' contribution has shrunk from 50% to 25%.