CSC clings to BHP coal business

IT outsourcing firm CSC has clung on to its deal with BHP Billiton to manage the mining giant's metallurgical coal and energy coal operations' IT infrastructure.

A spokesperson for BHP would not confirm the value or the duration of the contract, however they said the contract had been signed recently. The deal covers BHP's IT infrastructure that supports its metallurgical coal and energy coal operations, which form two of seven of its customer segment groups.

CSC had previously held both BHP's SAP Support and Enterprise Infrastructure Services contracts, which are due to expire this year.

IBM's Global Technology Services division last August edged in on BHP's Enterprise Infrastructure Services contract and was under a market testing initiative which appeared to had left CSC on the outer with the mining giant.

However, a spokesperson at the time said that IBM's potential work did not include "business specific" services, which "constituted a large component of the existing CSC contract".

The contract that CSC most recently signed with BHP appears to be a renewal of the existing deal it had held, albeit minus the Enterprise Infrastructure Services work that IBM had scooped from it.

Meanwhile, CSC had lost a massive chunk of its work with BHP after it awarded Accenture a "preferred supplier" status to support the miner's 1SAP, GSAP, and MSAP systems.

Still unclear however is what the mining giant intends to do with the IT contracts pertaining to the remaining five customer sector groups which include aluminium, base metals, diamonds, iron ore, manganese, stainless steel materials.

Midway through last year BHP promoted IT manager Ken Matthews to its head of technology.