Germany's Federal Armed Forces agency has signed a ten-year IT services contract worth about $9 billion with Siemens Business Services (SBS) and IBM. And an IBM source says storage is part of the project. (See IBM, Siemens in $9B IT Deal.)
"There is a storage element in the project in both IBM and Siemens Business Services' areas of responsibility. However, at this time we cannot go into further detail or quantify this specifically," says IBM spokesman Peter Gerdemann.
Just a fraction of the overall project, called Herkules, would be a nice slice of the pie. Plans include the modernization and management of the German agency's non-military networks and data systems in over 1,500 locations countrywide. New gear will include 140,000 PCs and 7,000 servers, in addition to hundreds of thousands of phones, both fixed-line and mobile.
Working under the banner of a newly formed company called BWI Informationstechnick GmbH (BWI IT), IBM and SBS will upgrade the agency's data centers, communications, and applications, which include Web-based apps and SAP databases. A new public key encryption system will be adopted for security.
SBS and IBM are equal partners in BWI IT, of which they own a 50.1 percent stake. Germany's federal government owns the rest of the Bonn-based outfit.
