Supermarket giant Tescohas signed a new eight year agreement with Microsoft. Tesco CIO Mike McNamara told CIO that the deal includes unlimited licences for the British company.

“It is a long contract,” said the Tesco CIO of the new eight year deal with Microsoft. “It is about as long as we would sign.”

McNamara describes the deal as an “enterprise subscription agreement”.

“So we have unlimited licensing over the duration of the contract. It is important not to count them [licences] all the time when you are a large distributed organisation like us,” he said of the benefits.

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Microsoft will provide its Windows, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, System Center, BizTalk and SQL Server technologies across the 14 countries that Tesco operates supermarkets in, as well as the rapidly growing Tesco banking, online and telecommunications businesses. The Microsoft Services Enterprise Strategy programme of consulting is included in the deal.

McNamara explained that Hertfordshire based Tesco has had a long standing technology relationship with Microsoft. The CIO began working with Microsoft when he was CTO of Tesco.com back in 1999.

Although recent economic forecasts and results for the British economy have been poor, McNamara told CIO that Tesco has continued to invest in technology infrastructure.

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