Unisys, Wipro ink strategic global alliance

Unisys Corporation on Wednesday announced a global alliance with Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro, to establish an integrated means to execute go-to-market and delivery activities for managed services.

The two companies will seek opportunities to provide a range of IT services, drawing on their complementary strengths, to enterprise and public sector clients.

Under the terms of the alliance, Wipro Technologies will work with Unisys to jointly provide deskside and hardware support services and multi-lingual service desk services for global customers.

"This integrated delivery engine draws on the complementary capabilities of Wipro and Unisys and provides our customers with a unified global delivery platform for managing their infrastructure outsourcing," said G K Prasanna, senior vice president, Technology Infrastructure Services, Wipro Technologies.

"This will help both Wipro and Unisys drive quantum business improvements for our customers through improved resource management, stronger governance and lower TCO," he added.

The alliance has already yielded a major engagement in which Unisys will be a subcontractor to Wipro in providing managed services to a Fortune 500 company based in the United States.

Wipro and Unisys will support more than 20,000 of the company's employees in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Unisys estimated share of the five-year contract, which was signed in the third quarter of 2006, is approximately $27.5 million.

Under the terms of its subcontract with Wipro, Unisys, as Wipro's subcontractor, will provide the client with non-remote support services, including maintenance for desktops and servers, deskside support, equipment installs, moves, adds and changes and tape exchanges at data centres.

Wipro will handle remote services, including remote server management and service desk/help desk support.

"Unisys and Wipro share a mutual commitment to customer service and innovation," said Randy Hendricks, president, Unisys Global Outsourcing and Infrastructure Services.

"Together we are able to create significant business value for our clients worldwide through a broad range of IT outsourcing solutions, leveraging each company's services and providing greater value than that of their individual parts," he added.