Canadian Pacific outsources IT to IBM
IBM Canada Ltd. will maintain and upgrade the Canadian Pacific Railway's computer systems under a seven-year, Can$200 million ($153.5 million) contract designed to help the railroad save money and improve services.
The arrangement will impact shippers because all aspects of the railroad's operations are controlled by computers, including mapping out how interconnections of freight cars and locomotives, traffic control on rail lines and in the yard, scheduling track and train crews, forecasting traffic, routing and monitoring track conditions.
IBM will be responsible for CP's servers, storage and emergency recovery planning. CP will migrate its mainframe and data facilities in Calgary and Toronto to IBM facilities in those cities and transfer about 100 employees to the IBM payroll.
Canadian Pacific said about 2.5 trillion bytes of data move across its information systems every day — equivalent to about 2,500 copes of the 40-volume Encyclopedia Britannica.