IBM Wins FleetCor Cloud Bid To Power Two Billion Annual Transactions
FleetCor will shift to IBM’s cloud in mega financial win for Big Blue against cloud rivals
IBM has this week won a major contract to provide its cloud services to FleetCor, a global provider of fleet payment management products such as fuel cards and workplace payment services
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, IBM can expect a healthy sum in exchange for its hybrid cloud, with FleetCor processing almost 2 billion transactions during 2015.
Specifically, IBM will help FleetCor in its expansion ambitions into new markets. The company is predicting $1.7 billion (£1.1bn) in sales for 2016, and has a market worth of $14 billion (£9.5bn).
Expansion
FleetCor currently operates in North America, the UK, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Russia, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and New Zealand. Some of the larger companies it provides services for are Shell, BP, and MasterCard.
IBM pinned the win on its cloud mainframe services, which it says are perfectly suited towards this financial use case.
“The importance of secure and reliable specialized payment providers is fundamental to global commerce today,” said Philip Guido, general manager of IBM Global Technology Services, North America.
“IBM Cloud and mainframe offerings deliver the tools to support FleetCor as it continues to build upon its position in its industry and transform for the future.”
FleetCor will move its workloads and data over to IBM during the next 18 months.
“Achieving scalable, secure processing to support FleetCor’s growth while applying new data insights from our card payment solutions to clients’ business needs are indispensable,” said John Reed, chief information officer of FleetCor.
“Our partnership with IBM will enable greater cost savings, enhanced security, and improved logistics to further operational efficiency.”
According to Forbes, IBM won the contract despite competition from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Reed said that IBM showed off particular prowess in mobile, and IBM sales teams continued to work with FleetCor staff from the start.
