Aviva insures datacentre future with £700m deal

Insurance giant Aviva has signed a £700m, 10-year deal with EDS to manage its datacentres in the UK.

EDS will manage two datacentres for the world's fifth biggest insurance group, both of which are located in Norwich but serve operations in France, India, Ireland and the UK.

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Aviva currently manages its datacentres in-house but the group's UK IT service director Malcolm Simpkin told silicon.com that handing the responsibility to EDS will cut the cost of running the datacentres by 20 per cent - some £175m - over the next 10 years.

"A key part of it is that there's a good amount of spare capacity in the datacentres and [EDS] will be bringing other customers into those datacentres, which we think is good for this area and good for us because we'll get some of the benefits of that," Simpkin added.

As part of the deal, around 300 of Aviva's IT staff will move to EDS on 1 July.

As well as managing the datacentres, EDS will also provide datacentre modernisation services aimed at addressing increasing complexity and legacy issues.

Such services could include server consolidation, automating infrastructure and implementing virtualisation technology.

Back in December, Aviva - known as Norwich Union in the UK until 1 June this year - awarded a four-year contract to Hitachi Data Systems to move business critical data onto its new primary datacentre in Norwich. This is one of the datacentres that EDS will take over as part of the deal.