Honda Motor Europe has selected Kyndryl for a multi-year contract to handle its centralized IT infrastructure and modernize the company's mainframe estate.
Kyndryl will help Honda to move its critical applications to its newly upgraded z16 mainframe and infrastructure which will help Honda to modernize its operations.
The z16 mainframe is IBM's latest iteration of the zSystems mainframes and was launched in March 2022, featuring on-chip AI inferencing.
Honda will also adopt Kyndryl Bridge, Kyndryl's open integration platform to get real-time insights into its IT operations.
Kyndryl Bridge will also, through its AIOps service, help Honda to lower costs while reducing incidents within its logistics operations, the companies claimed.
A subsidiary of Honda Motor Co, Honda Europe handles the sales, marketing, and distribution of Honda products in Europe, including automobiles, motorcycles, power equipment, parts, accessories, and marine engines.
We are proud to collaborate with Honda, helping them to drive agility and resiliency across their operations and harness their data through more innovative applications of IT,” said Liesbet D’hoker, managing director of Kyndryl Belux.
The contract between the two companies is a continuation of their existing partnership. Other Honda Motor Co. subsidiaries to have signed agreements with Kyndryl include the American Honda Company (AHM) in 2022 which saw Kyndral modernizing AHM infrastructure across its manufacturing plants, research and development, captive finance, and sales operations, and Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India, also in 2022.
Kyndryl was formed in 2021 when IBM spun off its managed services division. The company manages on-premises digital infrastructure and services for more than 4,000 clients, including the majority of Fortune 100 companies, and has operations in more than 60 countries.
Honda Motor Europe previously signed a five-year agreement with IBM to manage the company's financial and procurement operations on a single platform. This contract was an extension of an existing ten-year partnership.
In the US, Honda has a data center in California, where it uses a hydrogen fuel cell for backup power. The company is also working with Mitsubishi in Japan to develop a small data center that runs on hydrogen from an industrial electrolysis plant run by Tokuyama Corporation.
Honda is also a known customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS), having previously migrated its content delivery network to Amazon CloudFront.