Less than two weeks after landing a long-term professional services agreement with Vodafone Group plc, IBM Corp. is marking another major customer win. The vendor announced this morning that it has been entrusted by Workday Inc. to host its application development and testing environment for the next seven years.

Big Blue didn’t share the financial terms of the deal, but the pricing policies of rivaling cloud providers like Amazon.com Inc. might provide a small hint as to what’s inside the contract. Jeff Bezos’ firm gives major discounts to customers that rent infrastructure for an extended period of time in an effort to encourage long-term usage commitments.

There’s a good chance that IBM provided a similar price cut in exchange for Workday agreeing to make the contract last seven years, especially given their existing business relationship. Big Blue uses the company’s workforce management platform internally and has a special consulting unit dedicated to helping other organizations adopt the service.

Taking Workday under its cloud wing should enable the technology giant to cement the alliance while strengthening its position in the broader marketplace. IBM’s salespeople will now be able to bring up the deal whenever they’re trying to convince a large organization to choose its infrastructure-as-a-service platform over a competitor.

The contract also sends a reassuring signal to Wall Street, which the WSJ notes has voiced concerns about its ability to keep up with Amazon in recent months. In its recent earnings report, IBM said its cloud revenues rose 30 percent, to $3.4 billion. But partly thanks to differing definitions of what constitutes cloud computing — mostly how much private-cloud services should be included — two recent market reports from Gartner Inc. and Synergy Research Group came to different conclusions about how well the cloud unit is doing.

By all reports, however, IBM still trails far behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. And Deutsche Bank recently said IBM’s cloud services are falling further behind.

Workday, meanwhile, will gain the ability to scale its internal application environment much more easily than before. The company has until now used a combination of in-house hardware and AWS instances support development projects, which required its IT department to spend a lot of time on infrastructure management.

Replacing the setup with a single provider should dramatically reduce the amount of work involved in keeping day-to-day operations flowing smoothly while simplifying billing. Moreover, Big Blue highlights that Workday will also be able to take advantage of its platform’s global reach, which is facilitated by a network of nearly 50 data centers spanning 17 countries.

Image via Geralt