Bradford & Bingley enjoys early days of IBM deal

IBM Global Services has picked up a large outsourcing contract from UK building society, the Bradford & Bingley.

Big Blue will be paid in excess of £100m over the next ten years in return for taking care of the Bradford & Bingley's data centre, desktop and helpdesk requirements. IT strategy, application development and security will remain in-house.

The contract began in early September and Steve Horner, Bradford & Bingley Computer Services manager, told Silicon.com: "It's obviously still early days, but things are going very well."

At the start of the month, 40 staff from the Yorkshire-based building society joined IBM Global Services, the world's largest IT services provider. The companies say another 40 positions will be created, but Horner will stay in charge of an internal team of seven IT staff, with up to another 200 working on application development.

IBM is a long-time Bradford & Bingley supplier and provided mainframes for the society's data centre. However, Horner said IBM was up against Sema, for the data centre management side of the contract, and a joint BT-Computacenter bid, for managing the company's desktop needs.