HP Signs Up Sabre for $800 Million in IT Services
Travel giant network set to get a major infusion of new HP Networking, 3Par and HP Blade Systems technology.
HP announced this week that it had signed a new 6-year $800 million agreement with travel giant, Sabre Holdings. The contract includes IT outsourcing services, applications management, storage and networking.
"The travel industry is highly competitive, demanding that we develop and deliver innovative products for our customers quickly while keeping costs down," said Barry Vandevier, CIO, Sabre Holdings in a statement.
HP and Sabre are hardly strangers, as the new deal with build on top of a long standing relationship between HP and Sabre.
"HP has had a relationship with Sabre for 11 years and this relationship has continued to grow," Russ Krauss, vice president and chief of staff at HP Enterprise Services, told InternetNews.com. "HP is uniquely positioned to help identify Sabre’s infrastructure needs and with this new agreement, we have added HP Networking and 3 Par storage in order to help Sabre continue its successful transformation journey.
From a networking perspective, HP Networking will help to enable Sabre's infrastructure in a number of different ways. HP networking gear is a key component in the convergence and virtualization of the HP Blade Systems that will enable Sabre to continue providing innovative products for the travel industry.
"For Sabre to keep up with customer demands like new applications and services they need a data center that can adapt to changing market conditions," Krauss said. "HP Networking solutions will enable Sabre to achieve increased IT efficiently and agility, while lowering total cost of ownership."
Sabre will be implementing the HP FlexNetwork architecture as part of the agreement. The FlexNetwork architecture was first announced in May of 2011 as a new approach to deliver a unified networking platform. The FlexNetwork includes data center, campus, and branch components that can all be managed via HP's Intelligent Management Center (IMC) platform. One the key components that Sabre will be acquiring is the 12500 series switch platform.
While HP is going to be providing a lot of equipment to Sabre, they will not be deploying an entire end-to-end HP network.
"This is a heterogeneous network with HP Networking across the datacenter," Krauss said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
