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CSC drives a deal with Budget

Consulting and services firm Computer Sciences inks a tentative five-year, $200 million outsourcing deal with vehicle rental company Budget Group.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Consulting and services firm Computer Sciences has inked a tentative five-year, $200 million outsourcing deal with vehicle rental company Budget Group.

The agreement, announced today with the signing of a letter of intent, is expected to be finalized in March.

Through the contract, El Segundo, California-based CSC, will help consolidate and streamline IT operations for Budget, a global firm that runs Budget Rent a Car, Budget Truck Rental, and Ryder TRS, the nation's second-largest consumer truck rental company.

"This is the kind of deal we see as the evolving sweet spot in the midmarket that we think will be the lion's share of new business developed by CSC and its highly competitive brethren EDS and IBM Global over the next couple of years," said George Logemann, analyst at the Yankee Group in Boston, Massachusetts.

Once the agreement is settled, CSC will run and manage all of Daytona, Florida-based Budget's data centers, networks, user support services, applications, and maintenance.

Those services are now primarily located in Lisle, Illinois and will be moved to a new location in the Chicago area, a CSC spokesman said. However, Budget plans to retain a small IT staff at the corporate level to handle the company's Year 2000 upgrades, telecom management, and quality assurance.

In addition, an estimated 130 Budget Group employees now working in Chicago, Indianapolis, Orlando, Dallas, and the United Kingdom will be offered jobs with CSC.