Zurich Insurance Company (Zurich), one of the leading global insurance-based financial services providers, has renewed its outsourcing contract with Orange Business Services for three additional years, a testament to the success of its massive IP transformation undertaken with Orange. Since the original contract was signed in 2003, Orange has been successfully managing Zurich’s telecom and network services across Europe.

As a result of its IP transformation, Zurich can now leverage its converged IP infrastructure to drive new business applications and innovation. Its previously heterogeneous infrastructure has been consolidated into a fully converged voice-data architecture. Over these past years, Orange has demonstrated its ability to execute a massive IP transformation, which is industry leading, as well as its knowledge and expertise in demanding IT outsourcing projects. As an early adopter of a large scale multi-country spanning complex IP contact center, Zurich now benefits from this technological lead and can now leverage this converged IP infrastructure to drive new business applications and innovations.

Zurich benefits from comprehensive and seamless data communication services such as WAN and LAN management, Internet access, security services, remote access services and third party extranet services. The service bundle also includes end-to-end management of more than 40,000 IP telephones and call center solutions for up to 11,000 agents. As an early adopter of a large scale multi-country spanning complex IP contact center, Zurich now benefits from this
technological lead.

Additionally, Orange is providing mobile voice and data services to more than 5,000 Zurich employees paired with Blackberry services for another 3,000 users. Fully managed global video conferencing solutions such as Telepresence and HD video were just recently added to the service catalog, another way Zurich can take full advantage of its converged IP network.
Michael Paravicini, Zurich’s Chief Information Officer, said: “The high-quality outcome achieved is the reason for the renewal of the contract. With this outsourcing contract we were able to substantially reduce our telecom spend over the past years whilst increasing the service quality and introducing standardization across the businesses. Orange Business Services is an important and trustworthy partner for us as evidenced with the recent award also for telepresence to provide the highest quality of global collaboration for our teams.”

“We are extremely proud that Zurich has renewed this successful partnership with us for another three years,” said Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe at Orange Business Services.

“Industry statistics for renewing outsourcing contracts are low, less than 50%, so the fact that Zurich renewed its contract with us is a huge success. With this outsourcing solution tuned to the needs of both Zurich’s global IT organization and their local businesses, Orange Business Services demonstrates its supreme capabilities to offer complete end-to-end multinational and customercentric telco and IT services for such prestigious and demanding customers such as Zurich or the
financial industry.”

About Zurich Financial Services
Zurich Financial Services Group (Zurich) is an insurance-based financial services provider with a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America and Europe as well as in Asia Pacific, Latin America and other markets. Founded in 1872, the Group is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. It employs approximately 60,000 people serving customers in more than 170 countries.