Aviapartner, the international provider of ground handling services, has extended its contract with IT service provider Cegeka for a further five years. Cegeka will also provide new services for Aviapartner, who has decided to outsource its entire IT infrastructure. The contract, which was the subject of an international tender, is estimated to be worth more than 10 million euro in total. There is a variable pricing structure for the contract, in accordance with the services that are actually used in practice.

Cegeka already manages Aviapartner’s server equipment remotely and, in this framework, also provides service management and service desk services. In the new contract with Cegeka, Aviapartner will no longer invest in its own data centre technology, but will instead use Cegeka’s modern data centre in Hasselt (see press release from 23 June 2011). All its own applications, including software it has developed itself as well as third-party applications, will now run on Cegeka’s systems. Cegeka will continue to manage the entire infrastructure. Cegeka’s service desk provides first line support for all the IT applications that Aviapartner works with.

Cegeka has already started to transfer Aviapartner’s applications to its own data centre. Everything will be fully operational by spring 2012.

Public and private cloud
For this contract, Cegeka will provide hosting services from its own data centres, in a so-called ‘private cloud’. This will provide Aviapartner with variable costs based on the services it actually uses. Another part of the service provision comes from the ‘public’ cloud. Aviapartner works with Microsoft Office 365, the online version of Office. This means that all Aviapartner e-mails are stored in Microsoft data centres. The migration and service management of Aviapartner’s Microsoft Office 365 is being taken care of by Cegeka.

“We are saving costs by organising our IT infrastructure centrally and outsourcing to a single party, so we can achieve our international ambitions for growth more quickly. After all, our infrastructure can easily grow together with our business, whilst keeping costs predictable and manageable: with takeovers, the IT environment of the company that is being taken over can simply be replaced by our systems running in Cegeka’s data centre. Cegeka offers the flexibility of a small player, but has the professionalism of a large one,” explains Kris Geysels, CFO at Aviapartner.

Just like Aviapartner, Cegeka has its own plans for international growth. “This strategic partnership is helping two Belgian companies support each other in achieving their common ambition. An important condition for successful outsourcing processes is to have objectives that run parallel to each. Aviapartner and Cegeka have this cultural fit,” says André Knaepen, CEO at Cegeka.