Whitbread tears up old IT contract for £26m deal

Resstaurant owner negotiates more flexible contract

Whitbread Group has renewed an IT outsourcing agreement with CSC worth £26m, and will expand the use of offshoring work to India.

The new deal continues all services through to March 2012, extending a current contract signed in 2004, and expanding the total value to some £120m since 2000.

Ben Wishart, group IT director of Whitbread, which owns Costa Coffee and TGI Friday’s, says the new contract will deliver greater flexibility.

‘Over recent years, Whitbread has undergone significant change in terms of acquisitions, divestitures, integration and growth. After a thorough review of our operations, we felt that change was required,’ he said.

Under the new five-and-a-half-year agreement, CSC will provide applications support from India through its World Sourcing operation, making more use of offshore resource than before.

‘We’ve fundamentally torn up the old contract that we had and reinvented the relationship,’ said Wishart. ‘It’s a very different structure. There aren’t many new services in there but we’ve changed the way that a number of the services are delivered.

‘Our previous contract was a monolithic top-down structure. With the new contract we can scale up and scale down individual elements of the service to reflect our business changes.’

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