DirecTV and Hewlett-Packard reached a seven-year extension of their 12-year relationship with a new information-technology outsourcing contract valued at about $500 million, officials said Tuesday.
H-P will continue to provide IT operations and application-testing services designed to support DirecTV's ability to roll out new promotions and new services, acquire new customers and ensure they receive timely, accurate billing for the direct-broadcast satellite television services they use.
Specifically, H-P will continue to provide support for DirecTV’s billing and customer-relationship-management environments, including system integration and management, local-area-network management, data-center operations, release management, database support, application support, change management, capacity planning, disaster recovery and support for new technologies.
The deal is expected to result in $100 million in savings -- a 20% reduction in cost -- for DirecTV.
"H-P has been a strategic partner for DirecTV since we were a start-up company," DirecTV vice president of operations Dennis Fleming said in a prepared statement. "H-P's technology, managed services and governance model will enable our IT to be agile enough to meet our business goals as we look to further grow our business and provide our customers with expanded satellite-television programming and digital content."
In another announcement Tuesday, DirecTV installed about $1 million of Avid Technology equipment, namely its Avid MediaStream systems.
In March, DirecTV bought the Avid gear, which will enable the DBS provider to update and expand its standard-definition capabilities and build a foundation for future HDTV services.
The equipment includes four MediaStream servers with a total of 64 decoder channels and more than 25 terabytes of dedicated RAID (redundant array of independent disks) storage. The installation was completed in late August.
