IBM Lands Major Computer Deal With German Firm

It’s a bit of return to the old days when hardware, not services, drove the business at IBM.

Reuters, The Associated Press and Dow Jones News Service are all reporting this morning that Big Blue has signed its largest computer hardware contract in several years. Sparkassen Informatik chose IBM to provide 20 large mainframe computers costing at least $100 million and hundreds of millions of dollars more in other hardware over the next several years, the reports said.

The mainframes are known as “T-Rex.”

Sparkassen Informatik, a technology services focused on technical services for the banking industry, is based in Frankfurt. It is upgrading its older IBM hardware, the reports said.

Jim Larkin, a spokesman for IBM, said the deal was the largest since at least 2000 and maybe the biggest in 10 years.
An analyst for Gartner told one reporter that the T-Rex mainframes were worth around $100 million.

IBM: www.ibm.com