Global chemicals company Akzo Nobel has awarded offshore outsourcing company Wipro Technologies a three-year, multimillion-euro contract to manage its server infrastructure across Europe and the US. The Indian services company will consolidate Azko Nobel's data centres and implement stringent quality procedures to maintain and improve a wide range of business-critical applications such as SAP and Siebel. Akzo Nobel expects that the move will halve the company's data centre management costs.

Global cement major Holcim has opted to consolidate its data centre operations for the entire Asia-Pacific region with NIIT Technologies. Until recently, NIIT Technologies was operating a dedicated data centre for Holcim's business-critical IT applications in Thailand. As part of this engagement, NIIT Technologies would use its data centre and disaster recovery centre in Bangkok to help Holcim Group companies in the Asia-Pacific region access SAP applications and services round-the-clock.