The huge row between the State of Texas and IBM over a multi-year consolidation project moved on with the supplier taking its turn to dispute the client’s version of events and its right to terminate any part of the contract.

IBM is disputing that the Texas state’s Department of Information Resources (DIR) has any right to terminate the Master Services Agreement contract saying that the problems with the project are because of the client’s failures and are not issues that IBM can solve.

The IBM letter was prompted by a letter sent on July 16th written by Karen Robinson, Executive Director, Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) to Cynthia McLean, VP and Global Project Executive, at IBM in Austin, Texas, in which Robinson laid out IBM’s failure to deliver services in relation to a contract to consolidate the activities of 27 Texas agencies into two IBM data centers.

The dispute escalated last week when Texas DIR said it would take over management of the contract and begin seeking new suppliers by putting parts of the services deal out tender.

In a response to Robinson issued on Friday, McLean wrote: “IBM respectfully disagrees with DIR’s contention that IBM has breached or otherwise failed to live up to its obligations under the Master Services Agreement (MSA) and thus disagrees that DIR may terminate the MSA for cause.”

“In fact, IBM has repeatedly and consistently gone above and beyond its contractual responsibilities in an effort to overcome DIR’s failures to perform its own obligations under the MSA. It is those DIR failures that underlie the alleged breaches you attribute to IBM and are not issues that IBM can ‘cure.’ “

In her account McLean said IBM had offered alternatives which were rejected without discussion and said that it was failures of the DIR and the agencies concerned which caused the delays.

The dispute has its origins in 2006 when the state of Texas issued a tender to consolidate the data center operations of 27 agencies into two data centers.