German Bank-Services Firm Buys 20 IBM Mainframes

IBM has announced a four-year deal to supply Germany's Sparkassen Informatik with 20 mainframes in a contract valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sparkassen, a big seller of IT services to retail banks, will consolidate data and functions of 36 older mainframes onto the new machines. Sparkassen, which reported more than 700 million euros in revenue last year, sells to more than half of Germany's savings banks, and handles 23 billion computer transactions yearly. The company's 20 Zseries 990 mainframes, which IBM introduced last year, will support 30 million users.