Bharti Tele-Ventures has signed a five- year managed services agreement with Nortel to host contact centre services for more than 19.7 million subscribers to Bharti's Airtel GSM mobile, broadband and fixed-line services. Nortel will create a Network Operations Center (NOC) in New Delhi and provide network design, integration, support and maintenance services for Bharti's contact centre architecture. A 24x7 'virtual storefront' voice portal based on Nortel's interactive voice response (IVR) solution will be the cornerstone of Bharti's new contact centre operation.

Global Crossing has been awarded a six-year, 18 million pounds contract by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Under the contract, Global Crossing will provide CPS with comprehensive managed telephony services to more than 100 main sites across England and Wales, including its headquarters based in London, York and Birmingham, and numerous smaller offices. The Crown Prosecution Service is the UK government department responsible for prosecuting criminal cases investigated by the police in England and Wales.

The MSPAlliance, a global organization of managed service providers and service-enabling technology vendors, and Scott & Scott, a law and technology services firm, have announced the availability of the Legal Guide to Managed Services, providing MSPs with a resource for a variety of legal needs.

The European Invesment Bank (EIB) has signed a three year contract with Cybertrust subsidiary Ubizen for the provision of managed security services. Under terms of the agreement, Cybertrust will provide onsite security engineering consultancy, maintenance and support and 24x7 monitoring and management services for all EIB IT security devices. The contract is extendable to five years.

IGN Entertainment's GameSpy division, the supplier of multiplayer technology used in more than 300 PC, PlayStation2, PlayStationPortable and Nintendo DS(TM) game titles, has created a new Enhanced Persistent Storage system, a customisable service that allows publishers and developers to store extensive game data such as saved games, screenshots, player statistics and in-game movies. Players can then share and distribute their own data online or in GameSpy Arena.

Gladiator Technology Services, Inc., a national managed security services provider (MSSP) exclusively serving community financial institutions, today announced the official rollout of its new email security solution, eShield(TM), significantly enhancing the Company's robust arsenal of security solutions for financial institutions. eShield assists Gladiator clients in further securing their information technology systems and accountholder information in adherence with FFIEC regulatory standards defined.

British Telecom has selected United Devices' grid technology to power its virtual services platform, a new managed grid service offering. This network-centric application delivery model ensures mission-critical business functions via Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that govern how customers run applications in a reliable and predictable manner.

Vodafone Netherlands and Ericsson have entered into an exclusive managed services partnership. Under the contract, Ericsson will be responsible for engineering, implementation and operation of the access part of Vodafone Netherlands' GSM, GPRS and UMTS radio networks in the Netherlands. Vodafone Netherlands will retain ownership of the network and IT assets, as well as responsibility for the strategic direction of the network and IT infrastructure.

Egenera Inc., a provider of utility computing, has signed an agreement with Pernec Corporation as a distributor to sell the Egenera BladeFrame product line throughout Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. Pernec Corporation is a Malaysian J/V company between Amanah Raya Berhad (ARB), NEC Corporation Japan (NEC) and Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB).

Irish Estates' wholly owned subsidiary Vector Workplace & Facility Management has signed an all-Ireland services deal with BT worth around 13.9m. The facilities management contract involves the delivery of services to 255 properties across Ireland. The contract covers the delivery of services across 20 properties in the Republic of Ireland and 225 properties in Northern Ireland, including office blocks, engineering workshops, data centres and telephone exchanges.

Although nationwide prices are lagging, land prices in Tokyo rose in 2005 for the first time in 15 years as Japan's steady economic recovery led to strong consumer and commercial demand. The price of property in the Tokyo shopping district of Omotesando, where a new commercial complex called Omotesando Hills opened last month jumped 30.5 per cent. In Tokyo prefecture, residential land prices rose 0.8 percent, while commercial land prices increased 2.9 percent. In the greater Nagoya area in central Japan, where Japan's top automaker Toyota Motor Corp.

Visual Network Design, Inc. (VNDI) has launched Rackwise for Visio SE, version 2.3 designed to help customers automate the analysis of escalating heat, power and space. The new product features enhanced shape selection and data table-driven metrics, providing higher accuracy in creating, editing and integrating data centre heat and power modelling intelligence.

Tyco Electronics Power Systems, Inc. has launched the EUK240 series of DC-DC converters, which provides 240W of output power in an industry standard eighth-brick package. Optimally designed for high efficiency, the EUK240 series supports intermediate bus architecture applications with an unregulated 5:1 fixed ratio output. EUK240 is suitable for enterprise, server and storage, datacom and other networking applications.

Sun Microsystems Middle East & North Africa (MENA) has formed a strategic partnership with eHosting DataFort, a subsidiary of TECOM Investments and a member of Dubai Holding, to jointly provide remote monitoring and managed technology services to its customers. This new service, which Sun estimates may have a return-on-investment of more than 120 percent, represents a major step toward selective technology and managed services sourcing in the region.

3PAR has secured $30 million in equity financing, its first fundraising in more than two years. The investment resulted in less than 10% dilution to 3PAR's existing shareholders. New investors in 3PAR include lead investor Integral Capital Partners, AllianceBernstein LP (formerly Alliance Capital) and Open Field Capital. Integral Capital invests in information technology and life sciences companies that have completed the start-up phase. This includes late-stage privately held firms as well as those that are already publicly traded at the time of investment.

Platform Computing has announced that it has launched the Platform Alliance Network, an innovative partnership programme designed to build a broad ecosystem to deliver virtualisation solutions for the data centre. Platform also announced new partner additions to the network: CSC, Novell, Red Hat, VMware, Wipro, and Dell China. Enterprise IT departments are increasingly turning to virtualisation of IT resources as a key strategy to meet the changing needs of the business and build sustainable competitive advantage.

AmeriVault Corp. a provider of data protection services has announced that key company executives have just returned from a tour of China where they are mentoring and helping with the development of a start-up company, We Tie Technology. The Chinese based company is focused on bringing backup and disaster recovery managed services to Chinese businesses, to help them save money and provide a more efficient means of protection from routine and extraordinary disasters.

Digital Realty Trust, Inc. has announced that Zyterra Solutions, a provider of full-service, turnkey implementations of wire line and wireless networks, has signed a lease agreement to build a datacenter in Digital Realty Trust's 2323 Bryan Street Turn-Key Datacenter Facility. The datacenter will support mission critical computing infrastructure for Zyterra as well as support wireless applications for a host of financial and educational institutions that are customers of Zyterra.

IX Europe plc has acquired its eleventh datacentre, in Munich, and signed a substantial contract with a leading global internet company. The contract is worth in excess of £6.9 million (10 million) over a six year period. The 11,600m2 Munich datacentre, the Group's fourth in Germany, was built in 2000 for KPNQwest at a cost in excess of £17 million (25 million) to provide approximately 4,600m2 of net datacentre space. The datacentre asset has been acquired for a nominal amount together with a long lease for the property.