A major infrastructure services deal with HP that will support key systems at the luxury car maker has been signed by Daimler.

It is hoped that the deal with HP will reduce costs and provide support for Daimler’s data centres, in addition to HP providing management for Daimler’s financial services, sales and dealer organisations in Germany.

In a bid to reduce the number of its existing systems, Daimler is consolodating and standardising its global IT system, using HP’s Data Centre Services and Workplace Services to support streamlining IT in financial services, sales and dealer systems. Under the deal HP will manage data centre operations and workplace systems having first consolidated multiple data centres into one, therefore reducing the number of physical servers.

A new Brussels-based association for CIOs of large international companies was recently launched, with Daimler's CIO Michael Gorritz heading it.