FORT WORTH, Texas and ARMONK, N.Y. — The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF) and IBM today announced that they have signed a 10-year agreement under which IBM will assume responsibility for management of a large portion of BNSF’s computing infrastructure. Although specific financial terms of the agreement, which will take effect September 1, were not disclosed, BNSF will realize savings over the life of the contract.
The agreement covers BNSF’s mainframe, midrange and desktop computing environments and the operation of data centers in Topeka, Kan., and Fort Worth. IBM also will manage BNSF’s e-mail systems, as well as a significant portion of BNSF’s technical help desk functions. However, BNSF will continue to own the Topeka and Fort Worth data centers.
The BNSF computing environments covered by the agreement include the 5,000-MIPS (millions of instructions per second) mainframe data center in Topeka, 450 midrange Intel and Unix servers, and about 16,000 desktop, laptop and LAN (local area network) printers.
About 120 BNSF employees whose work is covered by the agreement will be offered positions at IBM.
“This agreement provides not only real, on-going savings for BNSF but also creates further opportunities for the 500 technology services professionals that remain with BNSF in Fort Worth, Topeka and other locations,” said Greg Fox, BNSF’s vice president, Technology Services and chief information officer. “BNSF is an industry leader in information technology and Web-enabled processes. We will retain that expertise and couple it with IBM’s solid track record of focusing on a set of core competencies, leveraged across multiple customers, to deliver world-class infrastructure services that go beyond those BNSF could provide on its own.”
The agreement also provides BNSF with access to IBM’s center of transportation innovation, based in Boulder, Colo., which will bring together a team of experts from BNSF, IBM Research and IBM’s transportation industry consulting practice. Members of the academic community will also be invited to participate. The team at the center of transportation innovation will focus on developing new technology applications for the transportation industry that can be used by BNSF or marketed to other companies to create new revenue opportunities.
“BNSF will be a living laboratory for the creation of new technologies for the transportation industry,” said Dwayne Ingram, vice president, Travel and Transportation Industry, IBM Global Services. “Together, we’re going to find new ways to make both BNSF and IBM smarter and stronger.”
About The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Company
A subsidiary of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation (NYSE: BNI – News), BNSF operates one of the largest railroad networks in North America, with 33,000 route miles covering 28 states and two Canadian provinces. BNSF is an industry leader in Web-enabling a variety of customer transactions at www.bnsf.com . The railway moves more intermodal traffic than any other rail system in the world, is America’s largest grain-hauling railroad, transports the mineral components of many of the products we depend on daily, and hauls enough coal to generate more than 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States.
About IBM Global Services
IBM Global Services is the world’s largest information technology services provider, with approximately 150,000 professionals serving customers in 160 countries and annual revenue of $35 billion (2001). IBM Global Services integrates IBM’s broad range of capabilities — services, consulting, hardware, software and research — to help companies of all sizes realize the full value of information technology. For more information, visit www.ibm.com/services .