BP retains HP for data centre services

Oil giant BP, still recovering from its involvement in one of the biggest environmental disasters in world history, has signed a US$400 million deal with HP to manage its data centre requirements.

The British-held resources company had outsourced its data centre management to HP previously, but under the new five-year, US$400 million deal, HP will standardise and consolidate BP's data centre operations across Europe and North America and use HP's Indian operations to drive down costs.

The deal, signed just prior to Christmas, includes enterprise hosting, monitoring, back-up and recovery and database and middleware management.

HP said some of the services will be provided on-site, others from its "Best Shore" operations in India - the cause of some controversy amongst HP's British staff, 1300 of which were laid-off in October.

HP said in a release that the agreement would help BP take advantage of "cloud computing".

"The agreement will provide BP with the platform and option to deploy HP's enterprise private and public cloud-computing services, along with external cloud services from other providers in a holistic cloud architecture," HP said in a statement.