IT support to enable growth and innovation
Logica, a leading European IT and business services company, announced that it has been awarded an IT Outsourcing contract by German Kloska Group. The five-year contract covers the provision of all required data center services as well as the network connection between all of the Kloska Group locations.

One of the most important business areas for the Kloska Group is supplying ships worldwide. In this market segment, the Kloska Group provides high-quality, just-in-time logistics services for the cruise ships of the Aida fleet and for the Arosa river cruise ships. More than 600 vessels are supplied with provision on all the oceans around the world. Well known ship owners work with the Kloska Group to have their ships outfitted.

Large corporations as well as small companies take advantage of the Kloska Group’s just-in-time 24-hour delivery service. The companies adhere to high standards of quality and are certified according to DIN EN ISO 9001:2000 and 14001:9005.

Logica helps the Kloska Group with their high level, innovative work processes. The services are provided around the clock on a global basis, whereby the organisation is mainly driven from Germany, as is the management of the IT required for these logistical processes.

During the course of this project, Logica migrated all the Kloska server systems, which were previously located in the Group's own data center in Rostock, to Logica’s data center in Bremen. All the wide-area-network connections used by Kloska and the required IT services were also made available by Logica. The migration of the IT infrastructure from Rostock to Bremen took around two months and was completed in March 2008.

The Kloska Group is leveraging Logica’s Outsourcing services to optimise the strategic restructuring of its IT infrastructure required as a result of the strong growth of the Kloska Group. The company was looking for a long term partner for the provisioning of best in class IT services who would be able to help the Kloska Group to keep on growing while ensuring a cutting edge IT system. For the Kloska Group it was also important to be able to plan their IT costs better in the medium term as well as the regional proximity of the new data center to the head offices of the Kloska Group in Bremen.

Uwe Kloska, founder and managing director of the Kloska Group, said: "With Logica we have found a service provider who offered us a compelling solution to restructure our IT in the way we wanted the job to be done. We feel that our requirements have been completely understood and that we received excellent consulting services. Logica and its innovative solutions are adding true value to our organisation which enables us to grow further in the future.”

About Kloska
Uwe Kloska GmbH was founded as a technical supplier in Bremen in 1981, which is where the head offices of the Group are located still today. Over the years, different companies that offered important services to expand the portfolio available to the customers were added to the Group. Today, the Kloska Group has business locations at all the important maritime locations in Germany as well as in Poland, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The 450 employees earn some EUR 110 million in sales a year. On the maritime market, well-known shipowning and shipbuilding companies in the field of cruise ships, container shipping and special shipping (tankers, LNG tankers, project and heavy-cargo ships, research ships) with their special requirements belong to the Group's customers of longstanding. Industrial customers of the Kloska Group include large, nationally active companies as well as medium-sized and smaller businesses. A team of experienced specialists in all the related fields has been taking care of the customers for years and is accustomed to acting with the customer's best interests in mind. Thanks to their creativity and enormous flexibility, the employees are well equipped to meet the needs of a constantly changing market.