Nissan North America Signs with EDS (HP)

EDS, an HP company, announced it has signed a multiyear technology and services agreement with Nissan North America Inc. (NNA) to support new product development and growth while reducing operational costs.

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

Automakers are looking for new ways to innovate as they work to meet the demand for environmentally friendly vehicles. Under the terms of the agreement, EDS will help NNA to standardize, optimize and automate its technology infrastructure, which includes HP server and storage technology. Additionally, EDS will transition NNA to an outsourcing model designed to improve integration and support of technology from multiple vendors. As a result, NNA expects improvements in governance, innovation in product development and lowered costs for its U.S. and Canada operations.

“The standardized technology infrastructure is designed to help NNA reduce operational costs and better manage its multivendor environment to support business growth with important new products,” said Darl Davidson, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Industry Group at EDS, an HP company. “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 center in Tulsa, Okla. The approximately 650 servers will utilize HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosures with HP ProLiant G5 and G6 servers. In addition, the data center will utilize HP StorageWorks disk arrays and HP ProCurve switches. EDS teams in Best Shore centers in India and Brazil will remotely manage the Tulsa data center as well as NNA’s distributed server and storage environment. Additionally, EDS will manage NNA’s mainframe systems in the NNA data center in Colorado. EDS also will provide hosted messaging and active directory services for 18,000 mailboxes across 38 locations.