HP and America Online Broaden Relationship

HP (www.hp.com) today announced that America Online, Inc. has selected HP in a competitive bid to be its provider of integrated support services for the company's server and storage technology.

As part of a three-year agreement, HP will provide maintenance and support services for equipment from HP and other vendors in AOL data centers across multiple U.S. locations.

"HP has been a long-time partner in helping America Online operate world-class services for AOL's customers," said David L. Cole, senior vice president of Systems Operations, America Online, Inc.

Building on the companies' more than 10--year relationship, AOL is expanding its existing one-year services contract with HP to include support of its multi-vendor environment over three years.

AOL also preferred to have a single point of contact for the support services of the majority of its servers in its multi-vendor environment so it could achieve better alignment between IT service levels and business needs, driving efficiency and reducing AOL's costs.

HP's integrated support services are part of AOL's ongoing efforts to improve business agility and enable it to standardize, rationalize and simplify the management of its technology environment, a critical step to capitalizing on change.

The services HP provides across AOL's environment include: Speeding time to change with a single point of contact and standardized support services and processes, and reducing AOL's IT workload by simplifying support services management as well as helping to reduce costs by freeing up resources.

HP will manage support for more than 15,000 servers from multiple vendors, which includes support for 9,000 HP servers - including HP Integrity servers with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors and HP 9000, HP ProLiant and HP NonStop servers - as well as HP workstations.