Car rental company Avis Europe is outsourcing its key IT services in a five-year deal with the aim of consolidating suppliers across the continent.

The contract has been awarded to Unisys, who will provide a range of managed infrastructure services for over 5,600 desktops in more than 1,200 Avis offices and rental stations across 13 countries in Europe including the UK.

'What we have done is to consolidate various contracts across Europe. We are hoping that this partnership with Unisys will extend past the initial five year contract,' said Mittu Sridhara, chief information officer at Avis Europe.

The main business benefits of the outsourcing deal are the improvement of risk management and an increase in security across the entire network.

Sridhara says the deal covers three core IT services - infrastructure management, service management and standardisation to a single platform.

Unisys will provide a single IT helpdesk under the agreement. All technology queries from Avis employees, offices and rental stations will be handled centrally via a multi-lingual operation based in Schiphol in the Netherlands.

The infrastructure management process includes the building, deploying, management and support of all the PCs and servers across Avis's organisation. The project includes a total refresh of the current servers and desktops to increase efficiency and help standardisation in business applications. It will also ease the management of upgrades, patches and new implementations. Most of the services will be provided remotely from the centre in Schiphol.

The unified environment will improve troubleshooting as well as the consistency of application performance, according to Sridhara.

'We expect that this should decrease remote management incidents, enhance our service delivery and provide a consistent user experience,' he said.

Sridhara says that Avis anticipates significant IT cost savings over the next five years. He adds that because the system involves various components, it would be difficult to estimate a return on investment, but he expects it to be achieved within the next four to five years.