March 17, 2008. IBS DataFort, a provider of functional IT outsourcing services in the Russian market, has commenced technical maintenance and management of workstations and peripheral equipment of Eurokommerz, the factoring company. Eurokommerz is the factoring business leader with the largest sales network within Russia and the CIS. IBS DataFort will serve 54 of 57 company's regional centres.

Over the past months IBS DataFort and Eurokommerz staff have been taking an inventory of personal workstations and notebooks, peripherals, servers, printers, active network and telecommunications equipment in regional offices. At the same time the standards development and approval are underway for hardware and software taken over for maintenance.

According to the contract terms, IBS DataFort’s basic services to Eurokommerz include hardware and software support and recovery; officewide hardware relocation; connection and configuration of additional peripheral devices; replacement of consumables; software and hardware operation advice to users; common dispatching services. IBS DataFort will additionally provide warranty and post-warranty repair services at regional service centres.

"An extensive regional sales network is one of our key leadership components but a chronic headache for the IT department," said Kirill Sermyagin, Managing Director of the Technologies and Innovation Directorate, Eurokommerz, "because we have to develop an individual relationship model with local providers for each region or set up an in-house maintenance service in order to provide centralized control and maintenance for all regional centres. Both options are costly and extremely complex undertakings. Now IBS DataFort will provide us with a uniform level of guaranteed high-quality service regardless of the branches location and quantity in essentially all our operating regions."

"Just several years ago complex IT requests in regions were sporadic and mostly related to hardware warranty repairs, but now we can see a lot of growth potential for functional outsourcing services in regional markets. Eurokommerz was one of the first big nationwide companies to enter into a workstation maintenance contract with us in 2007. We currently provide services locally through our service partners network, and we plan to open our own offices to serve both geographically distributed companies headquartered in Moscow and purely regional customers going forward," said Denis Kalinin, General Director of IBS DataFort.

IBS DataFort will support 54 regional centres of Eurokommerz, and the number is set to grow. The contract between the two companies was signed in November 2007.