IBM and Vodafone India today announced a multi-million dollar, five year agreement for IBM to manage IT services support for Vodafone India’s IT infrastructure and applications environment.
By bringing together Vodafone India’s enterprise data and cloud ready applications into a scalable environment that keeps data local, private and secure, the new IBM hybrid cloud platform will enable delivery of faster and more insightful data intelligence and support faster decision-making.
IBM will support Vodafone India’s IT environment transition into IBM hybrid cloud, allowing the company to leverage and integrate existing IT resources and data assets with private cloud environments. It will support Vodafone India’s speed to market and improve the efficiency of its network and IT operations.
This agreement builds on the existing eight year relationship between the two organizations.
“We are a technology driven organization and introducing the latest advances is key to delivering the best of experiences to our customers. Partnering with IBM will help us enhance customer experience with intuitive capabilities and build a cost optimized, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure,” said Vishant Vora, Director, Technology and Network, Vodafone India.
“We are delighted to continue our relationship with Vodafone India. IBM’s leading edge capabilities will help strengthen Vodafone India’s vision of delivering differentiated client experiences. I am grateful for Vodafone India’s continued trust in IBM and look forward to an enduring partnership with them,” said Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India.
Commenting on the deal, DD Mishra, Research Director, Gartner said, “Large deals combining application and infrastructure services are less of a trend now unless there are larger transformational objectives associated with it. Renewal of Vodafone India and IBM deal clearly indicates the partnership between the two organizations which is now 8 years old and appears to be more strategic in nature.”
He stated that initially the deal was more around traditional infrastructure and application services but now IBM and Vodafone have an opportunity of combining more industrialized and digital options which can be leveraged to drive better value.
Over the years IBM has been strengthening its digital portfolio. “This deal is a significant renewal in Asia Pacific market looking at the sheer size and volume of business. Further to this, we see, IBM has reorganized internally which is expected to enable them to bring decision making much closer to the customer,” he summed up.