European Space Agency signs $97 million agreement with EDS

EDS Corp of Plano, Texas, USA, has won a new, five-year, $97-million contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to manage the space agency's corporate information technology services and related infrastructure.

ESA is responsible for planning and executing the European space programme.

It undertakes projects involved with finding out more about the earth, its immediate space environment, the outer solar system and the universe. It also develops satellite-based technologies and services and to promote European industry. And finally, the agency has to work closely with all major space organisations within and outside Europe.

As the prime contractor, EDS has been tasked with managing a group of leading European vendors with a significant business presence in ESA member states, to deliver an end-to-end IT services model that will improve service, lower costs and leverage synergies across the agency.

The vendor team includes Orange Business Services, Atos Origin, Elsag / Finmeccanica Group, Vitrociset, Telindus, and Terma.

The team will collectively manage the agency's desktop, messaging and mobile computing environment for more than 4,000 internal users within ESA, its servers and applications infrastructure, and local and wide-area networks. The service solution has been designed together with the following EDS Agility Alliance partners: Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Xerox, EMC, Dell, Oracle and Microsoft.

The group will also provide information and communication technology (ICT) security, including firewall management, authentication and antivirus services, and helpdesk services for all internal users plus over 6,000 external business partners requiring access to Agency information.