Schroders is expected to announce today the outsourcing of its IT operations to Computer Science Corporation, the FT reports.

More than 200 Schroders staff will join CSC as part of the seven-year $240m deal.

This will be a nice bonus for SCC, the UK's second biggest reseller, which handles desktop product fulfilment in the UK on behalf of CSC. SCC won the contract earlier this year from Computacenter, CSC's incumbent supplier.

CSC and Computacenter appear to have had a bit of a falling out with the reseller not even invited to tender for the contract this time round.

Computacenter disputes the size of the loss - said to be £350m over five years by SCC, but admits it had its 'wrists slapped by CSC', after taking on some CSC accounts direct.

Computacenter has the biggest PC supply contract in the UK - with BT, which is not exactly in the rudest health. It has lost the second biggest contract (if SCC's claims are correct).

And a couple of weeks ago it lost sole supply rights over what is potentially the biggest contract of the lot - the GCAT catalogue, which one day could be worth as much as #163;500m a year - if and when the government succeeds in funnelling all public sector desktop IT procurement sales through this channel.

Computacenter now has to share this catalogue business with 25 other resellers. This is an unwelcome distraction for a company which is not used to losing. ®