South Africa's Absa Bank has extended its outsourcing contract for desktop support services to AST Distributed Technology Services (DTS) until 2006. The value of the contract is in excess of R140 million, per annum.
Under the terms of the contract, AST DTS will conduct maintenance and support services across a technology estate of some 30 000 PCs, servers and notebooks, and 1500 LANs. The South African bank first moved to outsource its desktop support in 2000.
Absa general manager IT services, Ian Ross, says: "AST assisted us in reducing the total ownership cost per desktop, improve our asset utilisation and we have the opportunity to immediately unlock value."
Absa and AST DTS are also involved in a R300 million joint project, aimed at improving the bank's cost-to-income ratio via online service delivery to customers.