The Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has announced a series of new contracts and contract extensions with UK firms, including Whitbread, Allders Department Stores, Homebase and Gallaher.

The biggest of the agreements is with Whitbread, which has signed a new seven-year enterprise resource planning (ERP) management contract.  Under the agreement, CSC will support Whitbread's Oracle 11iERP suite of applications and replace the company's key legacy applications with Oracle 11i solutions. 

The outsourcing corporation will provide infrastructure, help desk and Oracle application services to all organisations within the Whitbread group.

Allders Department Stores has made an extension to its current agreement with CSC and is upsising its IT outsourcing contract with the American company to run for an additional two years to 2009. This follows a series of successful wide area network and local area network upgrade projects as well as voice over IP deployment in all stores and head office locations.

Under the new agreement, CSC will provide infrastructure and applications support for additional equipment, including approximately 1,700 desktops, 1,500 electronic point of sale terminals and more than 100 servers. 

DIY giant and Sainsbury's subsidiary Homebase has also extended its contract with CSC, letting it run for an additional year.  The contract involves hosting the company's sales forecasting system and follows an earlier one-year contract awarded to CSC in 2003 for an undisclosed amount.

Its very encouraging to see the continued confidence the retail and leisure industry has in outsourcing and the benefits it can bring, feels Keith Wilman, president of CSC's UK operations.

'The ongoing and new work is based on CSC's ability to leverage our global strengths and IT services experience to deliver business and operational results,' he asserted in recent comments to the business press.

In addition to these new agreements, CSC has also won business from the National Health Service, National Grid Transco and the Royal Mail Group, in recent months.