OREANDA-NEWS. ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, announced today it has signed multi-year contracts for global infrastructure services with IBM for hosting management services, with Wipro for end-user computing and with British Telecom (BT) for network-related services.

The fully managed services will reduce operating costs significantly, increase flexibility, global standardization and coverage with a clearly defined service ownership in ABB. This will yield improved end-to-end responsibility and consistent-set up serving all countries, as well as improve reliability and service levels.

The new infrastructure will create a platform for business-led collaboration, with the same set-up in every country. It will allow ABB employees to work from anywhere as well as ease the relationship with customers, partners and cross-regional ABB teams.

"These contracts are another step in ABB's Next Level strategy aimed at accelerating sustainable value creation," said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. "The new IT infrastructure will support significantly ABB's three focus areas of profitable growth, relentless execution and business-led collaboration."

The hosting management services contract with IBM will cover an initial five-year period, with the option to extend the arrangement for a further two years. IBM will be supporting the entire global server estate covering all of ABB's business with 140.000 employees in over 100 countries, providing server management, integration services, storage and cloud management. These services will give ABB a simpler, but technologically advanced environment with improved productivity and service quality, as well as reducing overall costs.

The contract with Wipro will also cover an initial five-year period, with the option to extend the arrangement for a further two years. Wipro will be supporting 140,000 ABB users, providing help desk and on-site support for all desktop, laptops, mobile devices, file and print services and desktop application management. These services will give ABB users a simpler environment, improved productivity and service quality as well as reducing overall cost.

ABB selected BT to provide, standardize and manage its network related services in more than 100 countries, allowing all ABB employees to work more securely. BT will have end-to-end responsibility for the quality and performance of the network services, the local area networks (LAN) across more than 700 ABB locations and will provide security across network assets and services. This includes the management of 400 firewalls and the provision of BT Assure cyber protection and analytics services to protect ABB's network and IT systems against threats. BT solutions will provide ABB with improved application performance and additional IT security to empower ABB to focus more on collaboration, innovation and business transformation.