IBM lands huge German mainframe contract

IBM will deliver 20 high-performance mainframe computers to a German financial IT service company in a deal worth over €100 million ($127 million), IBM spokesman Hans-Jürgen Rehm said Friday.

Sparkassen Informatik GmbH & Co. KG in Münster, Germany, will deploy IBM’s new eServer zSeries 990 mainframes, replacing 36 existing zSeries 900 machines over the next four years, according to Rehm. “This is one of the largest mainframes contracts we have won in recent years,” he said.

With the new mainframes, the German IT service provider will increase its computing capacity to around 100,000 MIPS (million instructions per second), according to Rehm.

“To meet its rapidly rising computing needs, Sparkassen Informatik saw a need to consolidate its mainframes and decided to move to more powerful machines,” Rehm said.

Sparkassen Informatik provides computer services to around 240 German savings banks, accounting for about 25% of all IT services offered to retail banks in the country, IBM said. The group processes more than 23 billion transactions yearly, with its services supporting around 30 million customers, the Armonk, N.Y., company said.