"The deal with Catalonia is one of the biggest deals we have won outside Germany so far," said Deutsche Telekom board member and head of its T-Systems unit Reinhard Clemens.

"The economic situation in European countries is creating a favourable climate for big deals.

"When longer-term contracts come up for renewal, more and more large enterprises are looking to move partly over to cloud computing," he said, referring to the remote storage of data online, rather than on individual machines.

T-Systems said it would be responsible for operating workstation computers and applications, and providing user support.

In addition, it will network the public administration sites and provide telecommunications services and the data centre infrastructure, it said.