IBM has landed a giant deal with Royal Dutch/Shell as part of the
oil and gas group's plans to consolidate its e-business
infrastructure into three massive "Megacentre hubs".
The five-year, $100m single-source agreement will see Big Blue
providing the hardware for the new datacentres, including servers,
Shark storage, tape drives and libraries, storage area network
switches, and Tivoli storage management software.
It follows on from an agreement earlier in the year when IBM and
Shell said they would collaborate to build the world's most
powerful Linux supercomputer for seismic research.
The new megacentres will be based in Kuala Lumpur, The Hague and
Houston, and will initially provide infrastructure for SAP and
e-business solutions. The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies has
operations in over 130 countries, and include interests in oil and
gas exploration and production, power generation, the manufacture,
marketing and shipping of oil and chemicals, and renewable energy
products, such as wind and solar power.
Shell hopes to save $40m over the five years, with a reduced total
cost of ownership in IT procurement, more efficient IT service
provision and economies, resulting from convergence of software
platforms.
It says it is building an 'internal ASP' which will see a
consolidation of all applications at server level, starting with
SAP and JD Edwards' ERP, but eventually encompassing all business
functions.
Alan Matula, Shell's general manager of projects and solutions,
comments, 'This model supports our ever-increasing drive for
business convergence, which we believe will improve service
performance, provide an extended reach, achieve greater
standardisation and reduce costs, while improving quality.
"We were looking for a trusted technology partner to help us
achieve aggressive TCO targets in our MegaCentre project, one of
the most important IT initiatives in Shell's history."