Zurich Financial Services has entered into exclusive negotiations with CSC for an estimated $2.4 billion ten-year IT services deal covering Europe and North America.
The ten year master service agreement - which will incorporate data centre centralisation and server virtualisation programmes - will provide for country specific agreements to be entered into by the parties.
In 2004, Zurich entered a seven-year $1.3 billion IT applications outsourcing agreement with CSC under which 1600 Zurich employees were transferred to the vendor. At the same time, the Swiss financial services group outsourced the provision of its data and voice networking in seven European countries to Equant and contracted with IBM for desktop services in Europe, the US and Canada.
The updated agreement with CSC specifies a six-month exclusive negotiation period. Any deals hammered out are subject to regulatory and other approvals, including staff notifications and workers council consultations.
The potential total contract value is estimated to be approximately up to $2.4 billion, assuming provision of the full scope of services over the ten year term.
The programme is expected to commence with one or more country-specific handovers in the first half of 2010.