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Contract wins in India and Russia boost the company's global outsourcing unit.
By Paul McDougall, InformationWeek, Aug. 26 2008, 1030 hrs
IBM's Global Services unit is living up to its name. The unit, which accounts for about half of Big Blue's total annual revenues, has within the past week scored contract wins in India and Russia, IBM announced.
IBM said Monday that it had secured a ten-year deal to provide a range of technologies and services to India's Bharti Retail, which operates a chain of convenience stores on the Subcontinent. The agreement extends an existing, four-year contract between the two companies.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Under the enhanced deal, IBM will provide Bharti with data center and project management services. IBM will also help the retailer manage its applications, networks and IT security requirements. Bharti Retail president and COO Vinod Sawhny said he hopes the deal with IBM "will provide a distinct competitive edge that will assist the company's vision and growth plans."
"Our partnership lays the foundation in which future business functions can be supported in the course of the next ten years," said Sawhny, in a statement.
On Thursday, IBM announced that it has signed a three-year technology services agreement with Russian retailer LENTA. The deal is worth about $1 million, said IBM.
LENTA operates 31 so-called "hypermarkets" in Russia, and needs to build a more robust IT backbone to support its expansion plans. "The services contract, performed by IBM engineers on site, will help with hardware recovery times and thus facilitate LENTA's objective to reduce risks related to hardware operations," said IBM Russia infrastructure sales expert Grigoriy Davydov, in a statement.
IBM shares were off 1.36% to $123.22 in Monday afternoon trading as the markets trended lower on concerns about financial stocks and a fresh resurgence in oil prices.
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