November saw a flurry of major IT-services contract signings, including three worth more than a billion dollars each. The combined value of the top 80 deals announced during the month was $11.2 billion — up by 10% over November 2005.

Vodafone outsourced its applications development and maintenance functions to IBM Global Services and EDS. Though the company did not disclose the value of either deal, it estimates cutting down on costs by $1.07 billion (25%–30%) within three to five years.

EDS will support Vodafone’s CRM and billing systems in Germany, the U.K., Hungary and the Netherlands, while IBM will support operations in Spain, the Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Italy. Vodafone retains the right to premature termination of both the seven-year deals.

In another deal, Perot Systems expanded its long-term contract with hospital operator, Tenet Healthcare. Tenet has been a Perot customer since 1990, and the new deal will ensure that all the IT systems at the company’s 41 hospitals will be managed by Perot. According to Tenet, approximately 400 staff will be offered a voluntary transfer to Perot.

In July 2001, Perot extended its five-year deal with Tenet, as part of its $550 million contract. Since then, however, Tenet has divested more than 50 hospitals, and its agreement with Perot has been re-structured to take account of this reduction in scope. Perot’s performance in its most recent fiscal quarter was negatively impacted by a problem contract with another health-care organization, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island. Perot wrote off $43.7 million of deferred costs, after a re-negotiation reduced the scale of the project.

IBM beat Northrop Grumman to a major contract to provide data center management for Texas state agencies over a minimum of seven years. Under the $863 million deal with the state’s Department of Information Resources, IBM will work with subcontractors, including Unisys, Xerox and Pitney to upgrade infrastructure and provide security and disaster- recovery services for 27 Texas agencies.

A consortium led by Atos Origin SA has won a $570 million contract to act as the National Health Service’s main IT-services partner in Scotland for the next 11 years.

The deal is a boost for Atos, which saw its shares fall 20% in July after it revealed that it was taking longer than expected to sign off some major deals in the U.K.

On the NHS Scotland deal, Atos Origin will head up a consortium that includes BT Group, IBM and Sopra Newell & Budge to provide infrastructure, data center, business continuity, helpdesk and first-line applications-support services. Atos Origin’s share of the project is worth $523 million.

DATAMONITOR’S IT-SERVICES CONTRACT TRACKER LOGS EVERY PUBLICLY DISCLOSED CONSULTING, SYSTEMS INTEGRATION AND OUTSOURCING DEAL, WITH A MINIMUM VALUE OF $1 MILLION