Diamond trader spends $16.5m on IT outsource

Virtualisation is the jewel in the crownÂ…

By Gemma Simpson, 20 November 2007 14:40

NEWS

The Diamond Trading Company (DTC) has signed a seven-year IT outsourcing services contract with Unisys worth around $16.5m.

Under the contract, DTC - the London-based sales and marketing arm of the De Beers family of companies - will hand over the management of its data centre server environment to Unisys. The DTC sorts, values and sells more than 40 per cent of the world's rough diamonds.

Agenda Setters 2007 - Top 20

Find out who made it into silicon.com's Agenda Setters top 20 by clicking the links belowÂ…

1. Mark Zuckerberg
2. Steve Jobs
3. Eric Schmidt
4. John Chambers
5. Ashley Highfield
6. Nicholas Negroponte
7. Niklas Zennström
8. Diane Greene
9. Jonathan Ive
10.Viviane Reding
11.Paul Coby
12.Marc Benioff
13.Emily Bell
14.Larry Ellison
15.Jeff Bezos
16.Ben Verwaayen
17.Nandan Nilekani
18.David Yu
19.Satoru Iwata
20.Mark Hurd

This includes supporting virtualisation technology and creating an IT architecture to support the DTC's software apps and help the company improve supply chain efficiency.

DTC is aiming to move to the new virtualised infrastructure by August 2008, running on Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers, along with other servers and storage systems, at Unisys' sites in the UK.

Management and support services will be delivered from the Unisys facility in Bangalore, India, with project management in Hungary as well as in UK locations.

The diamond company is hoping Unisys will up its disaster recovery ante, provide consistency of service and better manage operational costs by reducing hardware requirements and making better use of existing IT resources.

De Beers has been getting more tech-savvy of late, having recently started selling diamonds online.

Post your comment

In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.

Log in or create your silicon.com account below

Will not be displayed with your comment

By signing up for this service, you indicate that you agree to our Terms and Conditions and have read and understood our Privacy Policy.

Questions about membership? Find the answers in the Membership FAQ