The deal between media giant Reuters and IT-services provider Fujitsu Services topped the chart in August. Reuters aims to cut its IT-infrastructure costs by $297 million over the course of the ten-year deal.

Under the terms of the deal, Fujitsu will be responsible for hosting and managing Reuters’ data centers, servers and desktops, supporting latter’s 17,500 employees in more than 100 countries.

Three hundred Reuters’ internal IT staff plus 200 contractors will be transferred as agreed to Fujitsu. The move will slim down Reuters’ IT team to just 25 people, driving annual cost reductions of as much as 30 percent. The savings will partly be achieved by running helpdesk support from Fujitsu’s service desks in Lisbon and Kuala Lumpur.

During the same month, the German financial-services giant Allianz awarded two of the ten biggest outsourcing deals of August.  

The company’s global investors division entered into a $542 million contract with Europe’s pure play BPO company Xchanging for retail-investment account-management services. Like Xchanging’s some other large contracts, the deal will be structured as a joint venture. Xchanging will pay $17.6 million in cash to acquire a 51 percent stake in Allianz’s retail portfolio management subsidiary Fondsdepot Bank at Hof in Germany, with an option to buy the remaining 49 percent for same price after four years.

As a part of the contract, Xchanging will run the Fondsdepot Bank facility from no later than November 1st, thus, improving the bank’s productivity through process optimization and expanding its business with third-party brokers and independent financial advisors. For more details on this deal, click here.

Fondsdepot Bank has 430 employees, and manages 1.3 million active securities accounts with a combined asset value of $26,000 million.

Meanwhile, Allianz also awarded IBM a $330 million deal to provide a range of outsourced infrastructure services for its two North American insurance businesses. The seven-and-a-half year deal will cover both Fireman’s Fund and Allianz Life through a single technology framework that includes data-center management, storage, backup and disaster recover, e-mail and deskside support, security monitoring, system software management and printing services. IBM had already handled some services for Fireman’s Fund, so the deal represents about $200 million in the new business.

In yet another deal of the month, telecom operator BT Group awarded a six-year, $257 million contract extension to Xansa, to provide Finance and Accounting (F&A) services. Under the terms of the extended deal, Xansa will continue to handle BT’s F&A transaction processing, ledger and payroll services, including accounts payable, cash, treasury, payroll, ledger and reporting services, until March 2014. In addition, Xansa will support the contract from shared services centers in the U.K. and India. Xansa is in the process of being acquired by French IT-services provider Steria, in a $948 million deal announced in July.

The Ten Largest IT Services Deals in August 2007

Customer	Provider	Engagement	Region	Value ($ mn)	Duration (in yrs)
Reuters Group	Fujitsu Services	Data-center outsourcing, desktop mgmt., helpdesk mgmt., Infrastructure mgmt., support, offshore contracting, server mgmt.,	U.K.	992	10
Allianz	Xchanging	Business process outsourcing (retail-investment account-management services)	Germany	542	8
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center	Science Applications International	Application mgmt., computer engineering, Infrastructure mgmt., support, system integration	U.S.	473	5
Allianz	IBM Global Services	Application mgmt., data center outsourcing, desktop mgmt.	U.S.	330	7.5
BT Group	Xansa	Business Process Outsourcing F&A	U.K.	257	6
U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command	Science Applications International	Computer engineering, consulting, IT consulting, support	U.S.	250	5
Department of Veterans Affairs	Dell	Desktop mgmt., hardware integration, infrastructure mgmt., managed-security services	U.S.	248	3
BSNL	TCS	Application development and mgmt., hardware integration, network integration, systems integration	India	140	5
State of Ohio	EDS	Application design, application development and mgmt., support, systems integration	U.S.	101	7 (est.)
Belk	IBM Global Services	Business continuity/disaster recovery, data-center outsourcing, infrastructure mgmt.	U.S.	98	8

Source: Datamonitor