ABN Amro has awarded IBM a 1.5bn euro (£1.07bn) five
year global contract to implement an on-demand IT
infrastructure.
The contract is designed to reduce costs at the Dutch bank and
support the rapid roll out new of IT services as they are
needed.
IBM will support ABN Amro’s desktop PCs as well as associated
printers and mobile personal digital assistants, freeing the bank
from having to maintain and update these systems.
End users will be supported by IBM's global help desk, providing
a single point of contact for all bank employees. Hugh Scott
Barrett, ABN Amro chief operating officer, said, “IBM’s technology
expertise, in conjunction with its knowledge of the banking
industry, will underpin the value of this global IT relationship,
supporting ABN Amro in building sustainable competitive growth for
the organisation.”
IBM will build the new system around its Universal Management
Infrastructure (UMI) data centre automation technology. UMI is an
infrastructure that supports utility computing systems. According
to IBM it is able to provide enough capacity to cope with variation
in demand and offer stability for IT services.
Under the contract, IBM will also manage core data centres
supporting the bank’s various businesses. IBM will use IBM
mainframe technology and IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems UNIX servers,
and IBM iSeries servers. ABN’s existing EMC and IBM storage devices
will also be used.
ABN currently operates three main data centres in Amsterdam,
Chicago and Sao Paolo, as well as some smaller centres. It is not
clear whether IBM and ABN plan to re-locate any of these centres to
India.
IBM is hiring over 14,000 new staff in India this year while
making redundant around the same number in North America and
Europe. ABN is also in the middle of a major redundancy programme
among its IT staff, which has seen thousands of jobs go.
The IBM announcement came as Indian offshore outsourcing company
Infosys Technologies announced that it has been awarded a five year
multi-million pound contract to handle application development at
ABM Amro.
Infosys has been guaranteed work in North America, Europe and in
the Asia Pacific region as a “top five service provider” for
application development at the bank.