The agreement covers Tapiola Group's mainframe capacity and related storage and backing up capacities, management and monitoring of the environment as well as application monitoring of separately defined systems. The migration project will begin at the start of 2011 and implementation commences in autumn 2011. In connection with these new arrangements, there will be a transfer to Tieto Finland of certain personnel who look after Tieto-Tapiola mainframe service tasks. The service agreement will come into effect after the migration phase on 1 September 2011 and will be valid for five years. The agreement's total value is approximately 23 million euros.

"Tapiola is a significant player in the financial sector in Finland. We are excited about our new co-operation aiming to improve Tapiola's services. Our strong expertise in the industry and extensive experience in outsourcing create a good foundation for mutual success and for supporting Tapiola Group's business growth and efficiency of operations," says Jussi Grönholm, Vice President, Financial Services, Tieto Finland,"and I warmly welcome the employees who are transferring from Tapiola to us."

"In Tapiola we must improve the cost efficiency of our IT services and secure our mainframe expertise. These factors were pivotal in the decision-making. We expect a great deal from our co-operation with Tieto. The mainframe capacity that will be made available to us according to our business needs will be flexible in terms of quantity and costs. Tieto's global 24/7 service model provides flexible, standard capacity service, which is considerably more cost effective than the present operating model," says Esa Viitamäki, Chief Information Officer, Tapiola.