Insurance giant Aviva has signed a £700 million (US$988 million), 10-year deal with EDS to manage its datacenters in the United Kingdom.
EDS will manage two datacenters for the world's fifth biggest insurance group, both of which are located in Norwich but serve operations overseas, including India.
Aviva currently manages its datacenters in-house but the group's U.K. IT service director Malcolm Simpkin told ZDNet Asia's sister site Silicon.com that handing the responsibility to EDS will cut the cost of running the datacenters by 20 percent--some £175 million (US$247 million)--over the next 10 years.
"A key part of it is that there's a good amount of spare capacity in the datacenters and [EDS] will be bringing other customers into those datacenters, which we think is good for this area and good for us because we'll get some of the benefits of that," Simpkin added.
As part of the deal, around 300 of Aviva's IT staff will move to EDS on July 1, 2009.
As well as managing the datacenters, EDS will also provide datacenter modernization services aimed at addressing increasing complexity and legacy issues.
Such services could include server consolidation, automating infrastructure and implementing virtualization technology.
Back in December, Aviva--known as Norwich Union in the United Kingdom until June 1 this year--awarded a four-year contract to Hitachi Data Systems to move business critical data onto its new primary datacenter in Norwich. This is one of the datacenters that EDS will take over as part of the deal.
Tim Ferguson of Silicon.com reported from London.
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