Saint Gobain to move over to IBM infrastructure

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Saint-Gobain in Brazil says it expects to cut the cost of its IT infrastructure while also supporting strong growth throughout Brazil, Argentina and Chile by outsourcing to IBM.

José Luiz Machado, Saint-Gobain CIO, says the company conducted a study to demonstrate the feasibility of outsourcing, and chose IBM as the most efficient service provider. “Because it is a dynamic environment, where new demands arise all the time, we decided to replicate here the service outsourcing model implemented in the headquarters in France,” he says. “This will allow us to gain more flexibility, and focus our efforts and investments on our core business,” he adds, noting that the company is going for IBM’s per-usage on-demand payment terms.” IBM will be responsible for on-demand hosting services, administration, support and IT systems management. The contract also includes migration of Saint-Gobain’s servers in São Paulo to two IBM data centres in Hortolândia. Machado says Saint-Gobain plans to phase in IBM’s infrastructure, starting in October and closing down its own data centres by March 2009. He says the Saint-Gobain infrastructure team will now focus on business expansion, identifying needs and defining strategies.