Tyre and car maintenance firm Euromaster has awarded a £19.6m (€28.3m) managed services deal to virtual network operator Vanco.

Vanco will design and manage voice and data networks that will be used by 12,800 employees at 1,700 service centres in ten European countries, as part of the three-year contract.

Euromaster expects to reduce its telecoms costs by 20 per cent under the new contract, with Vanco managing landlines, mobile phones, broadband internet connectivity and wide area and local area networks.

The outsourcing deal will see the car maintenance firm move from having decentralised telecoms contracts in each country to a coordinated service across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland.

'We wanted to adopt a new sourcing strategy for our telecommunications needs to take advantage of the new technologies available on the market and also make the management of our network easier,' said Gilson Santiago, chief information officer at Euromaster.

Vanco will also introduce a multi-protocol label switching network, meaning Euromaster will be able to introduce internet telephony, if needed.

'Managing and controlling the different contracts with multiple suppliers in each country had become very complicated. Vanco offered us a flexible and homogenous solution that perfectly meets our needs while reducing our telecoms costs by more than 20 per cent,' said Santiago.