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IBM scores Parion outsourcing deal

IBM has landed an $800 million, 10-year outsourcing deal with German insurance company Parion.

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
IBM has landed an $800 million, 10-year outsourcing deal with German insurance company Parion.

The new contract will be folded into an existing outsourcing agreement that Gothaer Versicherungen signed with IBM in 1994. Insurance firms Gothaer Versicherungen and Berlin-K?lnische Versicherungen merged two years ago to form Parion.

Under the contract, IBM Global Services will run all of Parion's IT systems and take over application development and maintenance.

Parion and IBM also plan to create a Center of Competence for the insurance industry, focusing on e-business, business intelligence, customer relationship management, and other new technologies.

The agreement is the largest strategic outsourcing contract in the European insurance industry and the biggest outsourcing deal in Germany, according to IBM.

Parion has 6,000 employees and 4 million customers and income of $3.797 billion.