BT wins $73 m Manpower deal

BANGALORE: Employment services major, Manpower Inc., has selected BT to upgrade and manage its worldwide data network. The contract, worth $73 million over the next five years, positions Manpower as the first company within its sector to move to a fully integrated, global telecommunication infrastructure. According to the deal, in Asia Pacific, BT will provide service in 12 countries, including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

Graham Moore, President of BT Asia Pacific, said, "We are delighted with this business, and look forward to both delivering on and growing the relationship in the region. This contract represents yet another credible example of BT's network and solutions capabilities for multi-site corporates."

Manpower's use of ICT is expected to yield significant savings by utilising more cost-efficient solutions and by assigning the management of third-party suppliers to BT. In addition, the upgraded network will significantly increase the bandwidth available to Manpower's branches in many countries, thereby improving the performance of business applications and streamlining access to company-wide resources.

Under the terms of the deal, BT will migrate Manpower on to a fully managed, global Wide Area Network (WAN) extending to 3,200 sites in 63 countries.

The solution comprises domestic DSL networks, which will seamlessly connect Manpower's offices to BT's global backbone. As part of this bespoke solution, BT will also provide ongoing monitoring of the performance of Manpower's telecommunications network and related business-critical applications. BT will use this information to optimise performance and will offer an end-to-end service level spanning all of the infrastructure elements provided by BT.

Rick Davidson, senior vice-president and Global CIO of Manpower Inc., said, "We were looking for a partner that could support our long-term IT strategy, which is designed to continue leading the staffing industry in effective and efficient use of technology to improve our business processes and accelerate the implementation of customer-facing applications. We selected BT because they had the strongest global footprint with regard to resources and infrastructure, demonstrated an ability to provide end-to-end network support in each of our global locations, met our technical requirements and were flexible in their commercial offering."

CIOL Bureau