Sal. Oppenheim Extends IT Outsourcing Contract with EDS

EDS today announced that Sal. Oppenheim Jr. & CIE., one of the largest privately owned banks in Europe, has extended its information technology outsourcing contract with EDS for five years. The firm, headquartered in Cologne, Germany, manages and administers 138 billion pounds of assets. The EDS contract extension covers the management of Sal. Oppenheim's existing IT infrastructure at all locations. EDS has managed and operated the Sal. Oppenheim IT infrastructure since 1997.

"We have placed our IT in EDS' hands for more than 10 years," said Siegfried Grohs, managing director product services & operations at Sal. Oppenheim. "As a bank, it is extremely important to have an IT partner that secures the reliability of our processes and transactions."

EDS is responsible for managing workplace services at Sal. Oppenheim, which includes local employee support, voice, video and information services for more than 2,200 users. EDS will also continue to manage Sal. Oppenheim's information storage, servers and mainframe computers, as well as the company's communications network. Services also cover IT procurement, housing and services for terminal servers, document management and the bank's SAP human resources system.

Several EDS Agility Alliance partners will provide services to Sal. Oppenheim as part of this agreement. The EDS Agility Alliance is a coalition of companies that help develop and deliver the EDS Agile Enterprise Platform. EDS Agility Alliance partners include Cisco, EMC, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Xerox.

Some 25,000 EDS employees work on finance-related projects for about 200 customers in 30 countries for clients such as ABN Amro, Aon, Bank of Canada, Bank of Queensland, la Caixa, CIBC, Commonwealth Bank Group, KBC, Korea First Bank, Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland, Socit Gnrale, Visa and Westpac.