Insurance giant RSA outsources to Wipro

Insurance firm RSA has outsourced its UK IT infrastructure to Indian IT services supplier Wipro in a seven-year deal.

The agreement will also cover Ireland and Scandinavia.

The deal will see Wipro deliver infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for mainframe, mid-range, storage, cloud and user services, as well as a multilingual service desk.

RSA invited 20 suppliers to bid for the work during a 10-month sourcing programme, aiming to consolidate its IT services in Europe.

“This partnership is a major step forward in our group technology strategy, enabling us to provide a market-leading, agile, affordable and secure infrastructure platform which supports profitable growth and enables our digital future,” said Darren Price, group CIO at RSA.

RSA has operations in the UK and Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, Latin American, the Middle East and Russia, and has 18,500 staff.

The IaaS sector of the public cloud market is expected to see the fastest growth in 2016, as enterprises continue to shift their datacentre assets off-premise, according to Gartner.

The analyst firm’s latest public cloud growth projections suggest the IaaS market is on course to account for about $22.4bn of public cloud spend in 2016, achieving growth of about 38.4%.

At the end of December 2015, analyst company Forrester said the infrastructure services supplier landscape was changing because of Indian outsourcers such as Wipro and emerging suppliers.

Tier one players in India, such as TCS, HCL and Infosys, have invested in resources such as datacentres and support centres in Europe.

These suppliers, which grew rapidly because of their offshore services delivered from India, are advocates of global delivery networks to take advantage of regional differences.