IT World Canada
Bombardier Aerospace, a designer and manufacturer of aviation products and services, on Monday handed over some of its IT needs to outsourcing provider CGI Group Inc. as part of a seven-year, $210-million deal.
CGI will now manage Bombardier’s legacy application services, user desktop management, help desk needs for its Canadian users, and data centre and infrastructure services at its Toronto location. In addition, approximately 210 of Bombardier’s IT professionals will join CGI’s outsourcing team. According to a spokesperson for Bombardier, the movement of employees to CGI represents one of the potential bright spots of an outsourcing engagement.
“The positive [side] of outsourcing is that the same employees [and] the same resources will be working on the same (things). We’re not losing any knowledge here,” said Lise St-Arnaud, director of communications for Bombardier Aerospace in Montreal, a subsidiary of Bombardier International Inc.
The employees now joining CGI were already providing Bombardier with application, help desk and desktop management support and will continue to do so with CGI.
For the past two years, CGI has supplied Bombardier’s aerospace group with legacy system support.
As St-Arnaud explained, the aerospace division is not outsourcing anything that is core, but has chosen to outsource non-core business functions. Its primary reason for entering into the agreement with CGI is financially motivated, but St-Arnaud cautioned that outsourcing is not the panacea for all Bombardier’s needs.
“We need to look at all our cost structures and lower our costs and become more effective…outsourcing is just one part of it, it’s not the whole picture,” St-Arnaud said.
This is the second large deal for CGI this month. CGI extended its existing 10-year IT outsourcing contract with the National Bank of Canada by adding another two years and $120 million to the original contract. The company will continue to provide application maintenance, support and the development of new application projects for the Bank of Canada.
Headquartered in Montreal, CGI is online at www.cgi.com and Bombardier Aerospace is at www.bombardier.com.
