IBM Global Services driving on with RACV win
IBM Global Services driving on with RACV win
Vehicle breakdown member service organisation, the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) has signed a deal with IBM Global Services that will see the RACV outsource its IT to the vendor as it looks to improve the efficiency and value of its IT infrastructure.
IBM Global Services, which is now under the sole control of IBM after it bought out partners Telstra and Lend Lease last month in a combined $313.5 million deal, will initially host RACV's mainframe applications and manage their existing midrange environment and applications.
According to Charles Burgess, RACV's General Manager IT&T, the agreement will help the organisation achieve its desired transformation to an "on demand" IT environment, with IT capabilities provided to RACV on a variable cost and capacity basis linked to usage.
"IT is not our core capability, and it makes sense for us to build a strong relationship with a partner who has the capabilities to manage it for us. We are moving away from owning our own IT infrastructure – we would prefer to access IT as a service and pay for it based on the computing resources we use in each of our individual businesses. We aim to move to an on demand hosting environment."
Burgess added: "IBM's strong focus on quality and processes will allow them to give us greater predictability and transparency of our IT costs. They have given us variable pricing based on use on hosting services, fixed-price charges for applications maintenance, and will provide fixed-price quotations for enhancements to applications which we can test in the market at any time. Our agreement is structured so that IBM takes responsibility for supporting our business outcomes, rather than being only focused on detailed contractual measures of performance."
Related Article: