The deal, one of the first since IBM bought out the shares in GSA owned by Telstra and Lend Lease, will initially see the services company host RACV's mainframe applications and manage their existing midrange environment and applications.
"IT is not our core capability, and it makes sense for us to build a strong relationship with a partner who has the capabilities to manage it for us," said RACV's general manager IT&T, Charles Burgess. "We are moving away from owning our own IT infrastructure - we would prefer to access IT as a service and pay for it based on the computing resources we use in each of our individual businesses. We aim to move to an on demand hosting environment."
The deal includes variable pricing for the use of hosting services, fixed-price charges for applications maintenance, and allows for enhancements to those applications. "Our agreement is structured so that IBM takes responsibility for supporting our business outcomes, rather than being only focused on detailed contractual measures of performance," said Burgess.
The RACV provides services to automobile owners including emergency road-side assistance and insurance.
Yes another bean counter seduced by the vision of "savings". I have lost count the number of times I have heard his type praising the virtues of "Leveraging off the vast resources of the strategic partner". If anyone can tell me where outsourcing has increased end user satisfaction, I would be very surprised.