British American Tobacco inks managed WAN services deal

British American Tobacco has offloaded management of its global wide area network infrastructure to BT in a deal worth at least $US100 million ($A96.8 million).

The managed services agreement covers remote access, network security and third-party supplier management across 1000 sites in 119 countries, including Australia.

BT said its IP-based network provided would reduce costs and enable traffic prioritisation across the network.

British American Tobacco has previously rolled out network traffic management products from f5 Networks to aid performance of a global SAP system for 12,000 users.

The 2008 f5 rollout saw products installed in British American Tobacco's global data centres in Frankfurt, Singapore and Brazil (pdf).