June’s list of the top 10 outsourcing deals shows a big surprise: A $1.7 billion domestic outsourcing contract being inked between the Italian Ministry for Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies and a domestic IT-services provider Almaviva for nine years. This deal was the largest ever IT-services contract in the Italian central government sector under which Almaviva will be responsible for the Ministry’s IT infrastructure.

Almaviva has emerged from the ashes of Finsiel, Telecom Italia’s troubled IT-services company, which was acquired by Italian entrepreneur Alberto Tripi’s CRM services business COS Group in 2005. The two operations were re-branded under the name Almaviva last year, and pooled together 15,000 employees with 2006 sales of $952 million.

While SpareBank 1 awarded the second biggest deal of the month to Norway’s EDB Business Partner for $604 million, Canada’s Defence Department outsourced its telecom services to Telus for $202 million. Telus is Canada’s second-largest telecom after Bell Canada. Under the terms of the deal, Telus will supply and manage global telecommunications services for the department.