Vodafone India, the country’s second largest mobile operator, has renewed a multi-million dollar agreement with IBM to manage the latter’s IT services support for IT infrastructure and applications.

The contract, which has been signed for another five years, is an extension of an eight-year relationship between the two companies. However, the companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

“We are a technology-driven organisation and introducing the latest advances is key to delivering the best of experiences to our customers. Partnering with IBM will help us enhance customer experience with intuitive capabilities and build a cost optimised, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure,” said Vishant Vora, Director, Technology & Network at Vodafone India.

According to the deal, Vodafone India will launch new hybrid cloud platform. IBM will support Vodafone India’s IT environment transition into IBM hybrid cloud, allowing the company to leverage and integrate existing IT resources and data assets with private cloud environments. It will support Vodafone India’s speed to improve efficiency of its network and IT operations.

“IBM’s leading edge capabilities will help strengthen Vodafone India’s vision of delivering differentiated client experiences,” Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director at IBM India said.

“Initially the deal was more around traditional infrastructure and application services but now IBM and Vodafone have an opportunity of combining more industrialised and digital options which can be leveraged to drive better value.

“Over the years IBM has been strengthening its digital portfolio,” DD Mishra, Research Director at Gartner said.

“This deal is a significant renewal in Asia Pacific market looking at the sheer size and volume of business. Further to this, we see, IBM has reorganised internally which is expected to enable IBM to bring decision making much closer to the customer,” Mishra added.

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