Terremark Worldwide Inc. has announced that BankUnited Financial FSB, the largest banking institution headquartered in Florida, has signed a multi-year contract for secure backup services at Terremark's NAP of the Americas. Terremark will provide BankUnited with secure remote backup services from its flagship facility, the NAP of the Americas. Managed services, including data replication services, will also be provided from a geographically diverse location within one of Terremark's other facilities.

Atos Origin has been awarded the contract to host and manage the Hong Kong government's Central Computing Centre, which will consist of ten IT infrastructure systems from seven government departments. The contract is estimated to be worth around 28m over a period of seven years. The contract is the first data centre outsourcing contract with an external IT services provider. The new deal with Atos Origin is part of the Hong Kong government's Digital 21 Strategy aimed at improving the efficiency of government departments.

Nokia is reported to have reached a 5-year managed services agreement to run Hutchison Essar's network operations in 9 circles in India. Nokia will assume the operation of Hutchison Essar's networks in Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chennai, Uttar Pradesh (East and West), Rajasthan, Haryana and West Bengal, thus allowing the operator to better focus on its customers and core activities. Nokia will provide network planning, project management, configuration and optimisation, network operations and maintenance and the administration of third party vendor contract management.

CRG West, operator of the One Wilshire Building and Stealth Communications, is now offering the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF) at One Wilshire. The VPF is a distributed Ethernet network which functions as a voice exchange, or meeting-point, for VoIP traffic. The VPF enables enterprises and service providers to establish peer-to-peer connections in a private, secure, quality-of-service environment. Going into its third year of service, VPF is located in nine US cities and London, serving over 100 organisations around the world, carrying over 18 billion VoIP minutes in 2005.

Ericsson is to outsource hosting of its servers in Spain to Telefonica Empresas. The project is expected to be concluded soon and will take place in two stages. The communication outsourcing includes all links between central headquarters and sales offices, supported by the MacroLAN service.

Leading Turkish industrial group, Zorlu, has signed a US $25 million, 7-year strategic outsourcing agreement with IBM. IBM will take over Zorlu's IT infrastructure, improving the efficiency of the Zorlu Group's IT operations and bringing expected cost savings of 30 per cent. In terms of the contract, IBM will manage Zorlu's server infrastructure, networks and manufacturing software, migrating systems to IBM solutions. IBM will also provide Zorlu with SAP operations, end-user support, network management services, data center operations management and hosting services.