IBM said Friday it won a deal to provide information technology management services to European insurance group QBE.

Under the agreement, IBM will provide QBE with a number of tech services, including support for help desk, data center, LAN, WAN, and disaster recovery operations. IBM will host the services from its data center in Portsmouth, UK.

QBE officials said outsourcing tech support to IBM will allow their company to operate more efficiently while focusing on core business activities.

"The agreement with IBM underpins QBE's European transformation of operational support services by delivering a scalable operations platform and raising the service levels for our global operating platforms, particularly in the area of disaster recovery," said Kathy Lisson, COO for QBE's European operations, in a statement.

"I am delighted that, after a rigorous tender process, we have appointed a world-leading partner of the caliber of IBM to work with us at QBE," said Lisson.

Other benefits that QBE hopes to realize from the deal include a smaller carbon footprint through a reduction in the number of servers it will maintain on site, as well as increased system reliability.

"Proven IBM service management disciplines and tools will deliver much higher levels of system availability and vastly improve QBE's business continuity infrastructure," said Bruce Ross, IBM's general manager for Global Technology Services in the UK and Ireland.

Financial and other terms of the deal, which was signed in September, were not disclosed. Shares of IBM were off .41%, to $122.37, in mid-morning trading Friday.

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