Sprint Sues IBM Over Failed Outsourcing Deal

Telecom firm asks for $6.4 million, charging that IBM didn't handle application development as promised.

Paul Travis, Managing Editor, InformationWeek.com

June 1, 2006

1 Min Read

When outsourcing deals go bad, someone usually gets mad. Sprint also wants to get paid, filing a lawsuit charging that IBM didn't deliver the cost savings promised under a five-year, $400 million outsourcing deal involving computer programming. Sprint wants $6.4 million for 119,000 hours of uncompleted development work. Sprint transferred around 1,000 of its IT staff to IBM as part of the original deal, but has since brought back around 400 workers and taken back control of its application development. IBM wouldn't comment on the suit, but the two companies remain on speaking terms. IBM's still doing a lot of work for Sprint under other contracts.

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About the Author(s)

Paul Travis

Managing Editor, InformationWeek.com

Paul Travis is Managing Editor of InformationWeek.com. Paul got his start as a newspaper reporter, putting black smudges on dead trees in the 1970s. Eventually he moved into the digital world, covering the telecommunications industry in the 1980s (when Ma Bell was broken up) and moving to writing and editing stories about computers and information technology in the 1990s (when he became a "content creator"). He was a news editor for InformationWeek magazine for more than a decade, and he also served as executive editor for Tele.Com, and editor of Byte and Switch, a storage-focused website. Once he realized this Internet thingy might catch on, he moved to the InformationWeek website, where he oversees a team of reporters that cover breaking technology news throughout the day.

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