IBM Secures £2.2bn Worth Of Cloud Contracts

IBM has signed a number of valuable cloud contracts with a number of major European firms, including Dutch bank ABN Amro, Thomson Reuters and WPP, the world’s leading advertising firm, building on the recent signing of German airline Lufthansa.

The WPP Cloud deal is perhaps the most significant, and is for seven years. Under the terms of that $1.25bn (£799m) deal, IBM will “transform and manage WPP’s global technology platform.”

“As the world’s largest communications group, we are seeking to exploit IBM’s cloud computing expertise to allow us to innovate and add value to both the service and the product we deliver to clients across 111 countries,” said Robin Dargue, WPP Group CIO.

Contract Wins

“This announcement is a significant milestone in the deployment of enterprise cloud and extends IBM’s position as the premier global cloud platform,” said Erich Clementi, Senior VP, IBM Global Technology Services. “Our secure, open enterprise cloud platform will enable WPP to quickly deliver new innovations to their customers.”

The deal with Thomson Reuters is a multi-year IT support service contract that will see the agency benefit from IBM’s cloud, analytics and mobile technologies to aid an increasingly mobile workforce.

IBM also signed a ten year multi-billion dollar services agreement to manage Dutch bank ABN AMRO’s bank operations. IBM will implement a private IBM cloud and will standardise and simplify the bank’s IT infrastructure to deliver cost savings, from mobile computing through to mainframe infrastructure.

And that’s not all. Last week, also agreed to take control of the IT operation and staff at German airline Lufthansa. That deal is said to be a $1.25bn (£796m) contract.

All four contracts are worth a total of $3.5 billion.

Cloud Expansion

In October IBM launched a new generation of data services on the IBM Cloud designed to ensure more trusted information can be applied more readily across an organisation. Earlier in that month, IBM and Microsoft signed a deal that will see both organisations migrate their respective enterprise software onto Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.

The partnership is particularly noteworthy as the two companies had until that point been cloud service rivals. However with this deal, both organisations are seeking to give their customers more choice by permitting their own technologies to appear on the other’s cloud platforms. Customers will simply bring their own software licences to the IBM and Microsoft clouds.

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