Dell's efforts of the past few years to beef up its managed services business has paid off with a three-year, multimillion dollar contract with Honeywell.

Dell won a contract last year for a similar project to provide managed services for Honeywell operations in 16 European countries. The new agreement covers 57,000 systems across all Honeywell divisions in the United States.

The managed services business at Dell is part of an overall effort the company has been engaged in for the past few years to bolster its market position as a provider of enterprise-class information technology. In the fourth quarter of 2004, Dell said that its service-related revenue exceeded $1 billion for the first time.

In the agreement disclosed Thursday, Honeywell will use Dell's service-desk capability to support operating systems and common software applications. Dell will also provide services that integrate custom software and standard application suites in the factory.

Honeywell also is leasing hardware from Dell, using the vendor's financial services to finance the program, and using Dell for asset-recovery services.