Unilever in $675m HP outsourcing deal

Food and household goods giant Unilever has signed a $675m outsourced IT services deal with HP for the next seven years.

The deal is an extension of an existing relationship between the two companies and will cover infrastructure in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South America, Turkey and the US.

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HP will provide a single point of contact for Unilever's enterprise computing systems and will work with the company's other tech partners, which include BT, Microsoft and SAP.

The deal is aimed at reducing costs and making the integration of new applications easier to manage.

HP will also manage Unilever's IT systems including its corporate data centres, directory services, disaster recovery and intranet hosting.

The deal includes the outsourcing of 4,500 servers and storage environments and will see 250 Unilever IT staff move to HP.

Unilever CIO, Neil Cameron, said the intention is to take advantage of HP's scale and expertise to provide Unilever with "world class technology at substantially lower costs".