EDS has signed a multiyear technology and services agreement with Nissan North America (NNA) to support new product development and growth while reducing operational costs.

The company claimed that NNA coordinates all operations, including automotive engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and consumer and dealer financing, for Nissan throughout the Americas.

Under the terms of the agreement, EDS will help NNA to standardise, optimise and automate its technology infrastructure, which includes HP server and storage technology. Also, EDS will transition NNA to an outsourcing model designed to improve integration and support of technology from multiple vendors. As such, NNA expects improvements in governance, innovation in product development and lowered costs for its US and Canada operations.

Darl Davidson, vice president of the US manufacturing industry group at EDS, an HP company, said: “The standardised technology infrastructure is designed to help NNA reduce operational costs and better manage its multivendor environment to support business growth with important new products. We’ve brought together a senior-level team with deep automotive manufacturing experience to provide an innovative solution that leverages the best of HP’s offerings.”

EDS will provide management services for NNA’s server and storage environment, a portion of which will be relocated to an EDS data centre in Tulsa, Okla. About 650 servers will utilise HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures with HP ProLiant G5 and G6 servers, the company stated.

The company further stated that the data centre will utilise HP StorageWorks disk arrays and HP ProCurve switches. EDS teams in Best Shore centers in India and Brazil will remotely manage the Tulsa data centre and NNA’s distributed server and storage environment.

According to the company, EDS will manage NNA’s mainframe systems in the NNA data centre in Colorado. EDS will also provide hosted messaging and active directory services for 18,000 mailboxes across 38 locations.