http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24967.wss

MOSCOW - IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Russian retail chain, LENTA, have signed a three-year information technology (IT) services contract estimated at approximately US$1 million. The contract signed in May 2008, will provide IBM support and recovery services for LENTA’s entire IT infrastructure.

The LENTA chain is actively expanding its operations with 31 hypermarkets throughout Russia, all open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. LENTA’s rapid business growth meant the company needed to establish a professional system for IT infrastructure support in order to help ensure business continuity across the company’s widespread operations.

“The services contract, performed by IBM engineers on site, will help with hardware recovery times and thus facilitate LENTA’s objective to reduce risks related to hardware operations and make the company’s IT infrastructure more stable,” said Grigoriy Davydov, Infrastructure Service Sales Expert, IBM Russia. “IBM’s retail industry and IT services experience will ultimately help LENTA provide better services to its customers.”

“We selected IBM because it has a service center and a stock of spare parts and components in St. Petersburg. Another key factor that influenced our choice was IBM Russia and CIS Service Department’s invariable focus on customer needs. The fact that IBM engineers are highly qualified and have the knowledge required to provide the services, recover hardware within agreed to time frames and use original spare parts also had a critical role to play,” explained Sergey Cherniy, CIO, LENTA.