News
IBM and Shell Announce Alliance
The Royal Dutch/ShellGroup of companies and IBM Corp. have signed a five-year strategic alliance agreement. The alliance furthers the IBM/Shell relationship established when the companies announced they would collaborate to build a Linux supercomputer for seismic research.
The alliance supports Shell's creation of three worldwide hubs to standardize and consolidate its information technology applications infrastructure. Company officials expect the value of this agreement to exceed $100 million.
Shell's MegaCentre will initially provide infrastructure for SAP and e-business solutions. A single-source arrangement has been agreed with IBM as the prime supplier of the hardware for MegaCentre.
MegaCentre is a large-scale, global IT application hosting environment that is consolidated at three regional hubs. The first MegaCentre hubs will be in Kuala Lumpur, The Hague and Houston.
The five-year global agreement includes IBM providing IBM systems, Enterprise Storage Server, tape drives and libraries, Storage Area Network switches, storage management software from Tivoli, and related technology.
Shell has negotiated options for IBM financing, technical support services and maintenance.