Indian engineering and technology company Zensar Technologies has signed a four year, multi-million-dollar contract with the city of San Diego for workplace and enterprise compute manage IT services.

The contract has the option of extension of two additional two-year terms with the total not to exceed the value of $122m.

“We are delighted the city of San Diego has selected Zensar as its provider for enterprise compute services and workplace services,” said Ajay Bhutoria, CEO of Zensar. “Zensar firmly believes that technology should primarily serve human needs, and has invested in bringing together the human experience, engineering, data and cloud to deliver solutions which power smart cities and high-velocity enterprises. We are proud of our continuing partnership with one of the most forward-looking cities in America.”

San Diego mayor Todd Gloria said the partnership would ensure San Diego was transparent and accountable in its IT platform while enhancing security all at a lower cost for taxpayers.

“This agreement is a key step towards supporting, modernising and enhancing our ever-growing portfolio of digitised services,” said Gloria. “We look forward to working with Zensar on several new projects to help enhance and improve the city’s data centre as well as ensure that all of the 11,000-plus city employees have the right tools to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.”

Harjott Atrii, executive vice president at Zensar, added: “This new agreement expands our successful partnership with the city, which started in 2018, bringing in exceptional value and cost benefits to the city’s constituents. We believe the city will be able to modernise its core systems, accelerating with higher velocity to becoming the leading smart city of the future. Zensar’s best in class smart city framework will drive a cloud-first strategy and the adoption of AI enabled autonomics tools, while delivering a unique and secure user experience to the city’s constituents.”

Zensar has been recognised by industry analysts for its capabilities and implementations in the areas of workplace, data centre and cloud services. It delivers end-to-end, integrations for IT infrastructure services for clients whose requirements and objectives are very similar to that of San Diego.

As part of its corporate social responsibility initiative, Zensar will be supporting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) education for youth by investing in programmes in the San Diego region. Zensar will also be expanding its support of stem in San Diego by offering mentorships, paid internships for students from communities of concern, participating in career fairs, conducting public speaking engagements, and investing further in educational opportunities.

There will be support for over 1000 city servers and associated storage and software that host over 300 city application systems. Public cloud support will provide many new services such as improved technology for departmental customer call centres, disaster recovery capabilities and data storage, with improved capability to host new applications quickly and securely.

The agreement for workplace services will provide service desk services to provide a central contact point for all IT services for nearly 5000 service desk calls each month. End user device support will be for more than 18,000 desktops, laptops and printers. And there will be enhanced mobile device support for about 6000 city-owned devices and employee-owned devices that have been critical during the pandemic.

“Zensar’s proposed next-gen integrated enterprise compute solution and human centric integrated workplace solution will enable the city of San Diego to achieve its smart city goals,” said Nishit Verma, Zensar vice president in North America. “We have also partnered with small local business enterprises and emerging local business enterprises in the region to help develop small businesses in the local community.”