Robert Greenberg, who became Nissan North America's CIO about 18 months ago, is taking back some of the IT work that the company outsourced to IBM in 1999 as part of a contract that at the time was valued at US$1 billion over nine years. In addition, Greenberg is redirecting application maintenance, support and enhancement work that IBM previously handled to offshore services firm Satyam Computer Services Ltd.

"We were happy with the services [we were getting] from IBM, but the world had changed," Greenberg said in an interview last week. Increased competition among outsourcing vendors and the emergence of offshore firms like Satyam have made multi-sourcing a more logical approach for Nissan, he said.

And bringing IT functions such as business analysis, program management, and application and infrastructure architecture planning back in-house should help the company better align its technology with business needs, according to Greenberg.

Double dealing

Nissan North America, which plans to relocate its headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville this summer, announced a five-year application services deal with India-based Satyam two weeks ago. Earlier last month, Nissan disclosed a new six-year IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with IBM that calls for extensive mainframe, database and server consolidation, plus a shift to a more standardized operating environment.