Accenture walks away from $3.7B contract
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(InfoWorld) - Accenture has walked away from two contracts to deliver regional IT systems and services to the U.K. National Health Service (NHS). An alliance led by Computer Sciences Corp. will take over the contracts, the companies announced Thursday. CSC already has contracts to deliver services in two other regions. CSC valued the two Accenture contracts at up to Â£1.97 billion ($3.73 billion) over nine years. In March, Accenture said it had made a pretax provision of $450 million to coverÂ losses it expectedÂ to make on the two local service provider contracts, to implement and service regional IT systems in the Northeast and East of England. Under the nationwide Connecting for Health program to modernize NHS IT systems, CSCÂ already has contractsÂ to deliver services in two regions, the Northwest of England and in the West Midlands. Under an agreement between Accenture, CSC and the NHS, Accenture has until Jan. 8 to transfer its responsibilities to CSC. Accenture and CSC had both turned to the same supplier, iSoft Group, for the software necessary for the project. In January, iSoft said it would deliver the software late, and in June restated financial results because of questions over the way it booked revenue before delivering products. On Thursday, iSoft said it will remain the preferred supplier for the Northeast and East regions, and that it had settled outstanding disputes with Accenture.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Merrill Lynch & Co Inc  on  Wednesday reported $7.9 billion in write-downs for the  third-quarter -- triggering its first loss in six years -- as  the company was burned by lax risk management and bad bets on  mortgages and leveraged loans for corporate takeovers.
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Suitors once offered $7 billion for Gateway, but after a decade of missteps and bad luck, the company is snapped up for a modest $710 million.
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Alliance Data Systems Corp , a provider of transaction, credit and marketing services, said on Monday its $6.76 billion buyout by private equity firm Blackstone Group LP  was in jeopardy.
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The contract is part of the computer giant's bid to wring more consulting dollars out of its printer business.
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The Beijing municipal government may be reconsidering its controversial decision to sign a sweeping deal with Microsoft. Microsoft beat domestic software developers out of a 3.6M dollar contract on November
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Losses ballooned to $207.3 million for the third quarter, driven by lower extended warranty sales and restructuring costs.
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After $536 million deal, Novell agrees to pull out of the European antitrust case
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THE board of Dexia, the Franco-Belgian bank, yesterday unanimously rejected a proposed â¬37 billion (Â£26 billion) merger with Italyâs Sanpaolo, bringing an end to what would have been Europeâs biggest cross-border bank deal.
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HONG KONG A 67-year-old public housing tenant Sunday forced the Hong Kong government and three of the world&#39;s largest financial institutions to postpone indefinitely a $2.73 billion real estate offering.
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AT&amp;T Corp. swung to a third-quarter loss of $7.12 billion due to huge charges from the company&#39;s retreat from traditional telephone services, which included at least 7,500 more job cuts and a writedown in the value of the company&#39;s long-distance network.
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The company&#39;s initial offer of $7.7bn or $21 per share, was due to expire at midnight tonight but Peoplesoft will now have another two weeks, until 22 October, to make their decision.
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CSC has a distinguished history in IT, and its latest deal comes to $3.73 billion.
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U.S. buyout fund Lone Star said on Thursday it was ending an agreement to sell Korea Exchange Bank  to Kookmin Bank  in a $7.3 billion deal, which has been subject to a long-running prosecutor probe.
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Morgan Stanley  on Wednesday said it has suffered a $3.7 billion loss stemming from its U.S. subprime mortgage exposure, which it expects will reduce fourth-quarter earnings by about $2.5 billion.
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3Com said Wednesday that it has withdrawn a $2.2 billion offer for the network equipment maker from consideration by a federal national security regulator, marking the potential demise of yet another private equity deal. It crystallizes months of fears and skepticism by investors that the buyout, by Bain Capital and China's Huawei Technologies, would fail because [...].
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(InfoWorld) - Banking and insurance conglomerate ING Group has finalized contracts worth â¬750 millionÂ ($994 million) with a consortium of companies to provide workspace services for its 53,000 employees in Europe. The contracts with Royal KPN, Getronics, Atos Origin, and AccentureÂ are each for seven years and cover the installation, maintenance, and support of desktop PCs, laptops, printers and telephones, the companies said Thursday. It's the biggest of three outsourcing deals that ING has finalized recently, worth a combined total of â¬1.3 billion. They are part of a cost-cutting plan announced last November that is designed to save the company â¬460 million per year, including â¬230 million from operations and IT. ABN AMRO Bank made a similar moveÂ last year, announcing a plan to outsource its IT operations worldwide in a series of deals worth â¬1.8 billion over five years. The bulk of that contract went to IBM. KPN took the biggest slice of the latest ING contract. It was awarded â¬269 million to provide fixed and mobile communications, call center, LAN (local area networking) and conferencing services for staff in the Netherlands and Belgium. Atos Origin was awarded â¬216 million to design and manage ING's back-end office automation, including e-mail and the active directory, and provide related support for end users. Getronics was awarded â¬213 million for help desk and on-site support for end users, as well as hardware purchasing and asset management. Accenture was awarded â¬52 million to be the "integrator," coordinating services and managing the supplier contracts. When ING announced an initial agreement with the four companies in July it said the contracts would run for five years and be worth about â¬800 million. It estimated that 550 full-time employees would be transferred to the contractors. That number will now be 430, it said Thursday. Of the earlier outsourcing contracts, on Nov. 6 ING finalized a six-year, â¬200 million deal with LogicaCMG for application management, IT maintenance and testing. And on Dec. 6 it signed a seven-year, â¬350 million contract with the U.K.'s Astron to process its banking and insurance documents.