Allied Irish Banks (AIB) has awarded a $150 million IT outsourcing deal to Indian IT firm Wipro, which will provide infrastructure management services, data center and hosting services to the bank over five years.The deal is Wipro’s biggest win in Ireland and provides a gateway to participate in other IT deals including the Bank of Ireland contract that is coming up for renewal later this year. Bank of Ireland had signed a five-year infrastructure contract with IBM in 2010. Besides Wipro, the bank has outsourced some of its IT projects to Ireland-based telecom company Eircom and IT security specialist Integrity Solutions. Wipro beat incumbent IT vendor IBM to bag the IMS portion of the contract. A recent report in the Irish Times said that AIB planned to outsource 170 jobs in its IT division to the three IT vendors, and the bank had committed that no staff would be made redundant. Wipro is expected to rebadge over 130 AIB employees and absorb them into its new delivery center that would be established in Dublin in the June quarter. The 200-seater delivery center will create a mainframe centre of excellence to maintain and modernize business-critical mainframe applications.
