Spanish power giant ENDESA signed a seven-year 360 million Euro agreement for IBM to manage all the infrastructure and information technology (IT) solutions that ENDESA uses in Spain and Latin America.

The agreement will allow Endesa an estimated cost saving of 20%, IBM said in a statement.

The project aim to deliver a unified global IT model for all the countries to help capitalize on its global scale to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and intensify its investments in core IT initiatives;create an IT platform prepared to immediately support their worldwide growth strategy;reduce the energy consumption of its IT platform in Latin America by around 50% (this could mean 1.290 CO2 Tons);and increase its security levels.

IBM told DatacenterDynamics that data center management was a major tranche of the project with some of the services to be hosted in IBM centers.
The agreement covers the implementation of a global unified IT model where users will have access to services provided both locally and from globally specialized centers.

ENDESA and IBM will kick off this project by creating a common IT model for ENDESA's operations in Latin America and Spain. The initiative will optimise management of the IT infrastructure by extending and upgrading the current model for infrastructure consolidation and virtualisation, through extensive use of information management tools and by unifying existing processes and operations across all businesses and geographies. The on-demand model is flexible so that IT resources in use at any given time can be scaled up or down in response to specific business requirements.

IBM will provide the following services to ENDESA:

• Management of the IT platform (major servers and intermediate systems), including all related development, implementation, operating and maintenance tasks under ITIL and ISO 20000 standards.

• Management of the micro IT devices used by 30,000 ENDESA users in their daily work.

• Management of the control systems inherent to operating the distribution network and the power generation and trading businesses.

• Business continuity and disaster recovery services. In the event of an incident (electric faults, natural disasters, fire, etc.), ENDESA will be able to restart its IT systems in as brief a time as possible from various IBM back-up sites.This agreement expands the previous 7 year transaction closed in 2003 for IBM to manage ENDESA's IT infrastructure in Spain.