IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that it has signed three services agreements with clients in South America.
IBM recently reported that in the fourth quarter of 2007, IBM generated sixty-five percent of its business outside the United States. Today's announcements further indicate that IBM's strategic focus on delivering technology and services to growth markets, such as countries in South America, is gaining momentum.
Today's announcements from South America include:
- Cebrace (Brazil) - Cebrace, the largest manufacturer of plated glass in South America, needed to invest heavily in technology to assemble its entire IT environment without worrying about the acquisition of assets and resources. This scenario led Cebrace to hire IBM to host and manage the resources of a new SAP environment, in order to manage the company's full production chain. The SAP system will be hosted in two data centers of IBM's Technology Center in Hortolândia, Sao Paulo (Brazil) - which makes it a safe and highly available environment.
- Inversura (Colombia) - Inversura, a leading insurance and social security group in Colombia, and IBM have signed the renewal of a five-year services contract. This strategic outsourcing project aims at managing its data center and the services related to core systems integration including hardware and software. The new hosted environment will help improve system availability through a clustered infrastructure (located in two distant and interconnected sites) and scale faster to better meet the technological demands of the business. The company expects to gain a competitive advantage by consolidating its existing IT infrastructure to increase flexibility and lower operating costs.
- Santander RIO Bank (Argentina) - Santander RIO, one of the largest banks worldwide in terms of stock market capitalization and one of the leading private banks in the Argentine financial system, has selected IBM as the partner for managed technical support during the fourth quarter of 2007. This solution, which promotes a single point-of-contact for the support of its entire IT Platform, includes maintenance and technical support services for multi-vendor distributed hardware infrastructure such as support to workstations, servers, PCs, printers and peripherals for ten central buildings including data centers and 254 branches throughout the country.
"These services agreements reflect the strength of IBM's global business model," said Gonzalo Escajadillo, GM GTS IBM Latin America. "Globalization is providing opportunities for organizations to tap into the right resources to transform and grow their businesses. IBM is uniquely positioned in Latin America to effectively integrate local and global capability to help our clients succeed."
All of the agreements were signed during the fourth quarter of 2007.