Diamond trader spends $16.5m on IT outsource

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.

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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.