BT today announced a contract with Dutch railway infrastructure provider ProRail covering the housing of mission-critical traffic management- and planning information systems in its Nieuwegein data centre in the Netherlands. This initiative will help ProRail in its strategy to further enhance resiliency of its assets, processes and underlying IT-systems, transporting on average more than 1 million passengers and 115,000 tons of freight per day.

Henk Bothof – Director ICT at ProRail, said: 'To allow us to run our operations smoothly, our management and information systems absolutely require a reliable, resilient and secure infrastructure at their core. By signing this telehousing contract with BT, we are confident that we are bringing that vision closer to reality. Based on the responses made to our open European tender, BT offers us the best fitting data centre facilities, conditions and service. Taking into account BT's knowledge and experience in other areas of our operation, I am confident we have the right partner to help us further improve services to train passengers and rail freight services providers.'

Edwin Hageman, CEO BT Benelux, said: 'Organisations are increasingly turning to centrally housed and managed IT services. To meet this growing demand, we recently expanded our green data centre in Nieuwegein. This latest contract with ProRail demonstrates that we are successfully addressing the needs of customers in our drive to connect them to a better future.'

BT provides a comprehensive portfolio of telehousing, managed hosting and cloud services from its secure, green and cost-efficient data centres in the Benelux and around the world. These include, for example, the provision of pre-configured and fully maintained server capacity, storage capacity and cloud-based applications ('Software as a Service', SaaS) such as unified communications, mobile device management, e-mail and collaboration services. BT Telehousing provides capacity for public sector, corporate clients and other network operators and is part of the BT Compute portfolio; a range of powerful services to help ensure high-security data housing, hosting and storage. BT operates 45 data centres, including two in the Netherlands.

ProRail is a long-standing BT customer. BT delivers managed networked IT services and BT Advise teams of professional services consultants are delivering consulting and projects. BT also provides ProRail with a converged fixed-mobile IP-telephony solution, part of the BT One unified communications portfolio of solutions that enable employees to work more flexibly and collaborate better.

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About ProRail
ProRail BV manages and builds rail and other infrastructure in the Netherlands. The management includes care of quality, reliability and availability of the infrastructure, in particular rail infrastructure and related facilities, as well as a fair, non-discriminatory distribution of the capacity of these infrastructures as well as directing the traffic over this infrastructure as well as plan, prepare and build of infrastructure.