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Sprint and IBM today announced a five-year Information Technology (IT) agreement valued at more than $400 million that is expected to accelerate Sprint's delivery of products to customers and vault the company's IT business practices to best in class. Under terms of the agreement, which expands the scope of existing IT work between the companies announced in September 2003, IBM Global Services will provide application development and maintenance support for selected Sprint IT software systems and will work with Sprint to: Establish accelerated software application delivery services to allow Sprint to more quickly deliver new and differentiated products to its customers while decreasing costs. Achieve Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI®) Level 3 certification, which is an industry-recognized standard set by Carnegie Mellon University for software application development and management. CMMI Level 3 certification demonstrates that Sprint incorporates the best IT business practices, ensuring predictability, lower costs and improved quality in performance. "This is the latest in a series of projects we've undertaken with IBM Global Services to draw on their consultants' expertise in business processes and project management," said Michael W. Stout, chief information officer, Sprint. "By leveraging the expertise and technology of business partners like IBM, Sprint is able to focus on areas of growth and innovation and strengthen our competitive position in service cost and quality." Sprint expects this agreement to further improve IT application development and maintenance processes, reduce cost and increase flexibility. These improvements will support Sprint's transformation to a customer-centric organization and deliver cost savings contributing to its previously announced transformation goal of reducing annual operating expenses by more than $1 billion over the next two years. "IBM is delivering industry-leading business process transformation services to Sprint," said Dean Douglas, vice president of telecommunications, IBM Global Services. "Just as IBM has taken steps to dramatically reduce the number of applications used to operate its businesses, we're sharing those lessons learned to help cut Sprint's core business applications and improve its efficiency and speed to market." As part of the agreement, approximately 1,000 Sprint IT employees will transfer to IBM to support Sprint applications.