Contract killings - who was opening the bubbly in March

silicon.com's second monthly round-up of IT contract wins has revealed that in a less than favourable economic climate big money deals can still be inked.

For the second month running, IBM was at the top of the pile. Its $500m contract with Swiss food group Nestle followed last month's $4bn deal with American Express. The credit card company was eager to slash its IT budget which runs to hundreds of millions of dollars.

This month Computacenter became another company to make princely gains from companies' desperate need to slash IT costs. Its £150m deal with BT is part of the incumbent's bid to reduce its debt mountain. It hasn't, however, proved quite so popular with BT staff who are expected to be transferred to the Computacenter payroll and are wary of the prospect of redundancy.

BT has also been on the receiving end, with a £50m MoD deal which will see it provide a radio communications network to the police and army. It's clear the UK government, for this month at least, has proved to be a real sweet spot. It has chosen to outsource a large slice of the infrastructure behind its controversial congestion scheme to the equally controversial Capita. The traffic scheme deal is worth £230m and follows in the wake of Capita's involvement with the Individual Learning Account (ILA) scheme which was abruptly pulled last November.

Also this month, the NHS has splashed out a total of £12m on deals with Novell and Misys. It will spend £9m on a three-year contract which will see it buy into Novell's network operating system Netware, its messaging package and web services software.

The deal is an example of where the NHS hopes to save money by negotiating deals with IT vendors and services companies as a complete organisation as opposed to individual trusts.

Although the nature of how the NHS will conduct the negotiation of its contracts looks set to change, there are two certainties. It will continue to spend big money on IT and it will continue to look for more efficient ways of doing so.