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The Role and requirement of Clause 4: In-House Support Team the la-House support team:-

The Maintenance Services provided As highlighted in the by MSEA hereunder constitute agreement, the In-House second-level maintenance. support team is required to Accordingly, SUBLICENSEE must understand the concerns / establish and maintain an in-house requirements from the Indian technical support team of Users at customers employees who are each Site whose members possess actually using the software the requisite business and technical and explain the same to the competencies and knowledge in Appellant's technical team to respect of each Site and in respect help them resolve the errors / of each Authorized Business and bugs. have received appropriate training from MSEA and are competent in As you will appreciate the the use of the Software Program Indian customers to whom ("In-House Support Team") ... the Appellant caters to are generally large financial 1.3.1 In-House Support. organizations with many SUBLICENSEE'S in-house support employees in its organization. group in Mumbai ("In-House For example, say SBI, which Support Group") will be generally is one of the customers to responsible for providing Internal M/s. Murex Southeast Asia Pvt. Ltd.

to the proper usage of the program. Considering it is a specific software for financial sector customers, it is necessary for the Appellant to provide training to the Indian customers else the software would be of little value / use to the said customers. In simple terms, such training is akin to training provided to an individual for operating any product such as a software like SAP, Tally, Microsoft Excel or even a refrigerator / water purifier.

team of the company in India. Indian customers have in-house support team which is required to understand the source / requirements from the Indian customers. Employees of the Indian customers who are using the software, if they happen to come across any problem, then the same is referred to the assessee‟s technical team to help them to resolve errors / bugs. These Indian customers are mainly big organizations and the one of the biggest customer was SBI, to whom the assessee has sub- licensed its software and which is used by lakhs of employees. SBI has an internal IT team to cater assistance to their employees in case there are any queries / bugs. That in-house team coordinates with assessee for resolving such queries / bugs. The in-house support team of the Indian customers is mainly a centralized point of contact for purpose of co-ordination and related activities of Indian customers with the assessee. Since, the role of in-house support team involves coordinating with the assessee regarding MSEA software programme supplied by the assessee, the personnel in such In-House support team / IT team need to be competent to know how to use the software program to be able to effectively explain the query / bug to MSEA which would then enable MSEA to identify the issue and resolve the same. This fact is clearly borne out from the relevant clauses of the agreements which has been filed before us and also which has been noted in the foregoing paragraphs.

12. If it is of recurring annual fees, there is no question that assessee was making available any technology or knowhow of the Indian customers on year to year basis as has been interpreted by the ld. AO. Assessee is having the technical expertise in the software sub-licensed by it. If there is any bug or problem faced by the customers while using the software, assessee provides trouble shooting to fix those bugs and helps them for M/s. Murex Southeast Asia Pvt. Ltd.