MANILA, Philippines--IBM said it will boost language capabilities of its outsourcing operations in the country to cover more markets while introducing new services.

The company announced a seven-year outsourcing deal with consumer products firm Sara Lee Corporation. .

IBM will manage a portion of Sara Lee's North American and European finance and applications development and maintenance requirements.

IBM said its global delivery center in Manila has been selected as one of the locations to deliver the finance and accounting services.

As a result of this deal, IBM said it will increase the capabilities of its delivery center here in order to provide multilingual services in German, French, and Spanish, in addition to English and local dialects.

"This pact allows us to further grow our local F&A (finance and accounting) business process services, and at the same time kick off our new supply chain management services locally,” said James Velasquez, IBM Philippines country general manager.

Sara Lee manufactures consumer and household brands like Ambi Pur, BallPark, Douwe Egberts, Hillshire Farm, Jimmy Dean, Kiwi, Sanex, Sara Lee and Senseo.

The company employs more than 44,000 employees worldwide.

IBM employs more than 7,000 workers across all business units in the Philippines, a bulk of which is in its call center and business process outsourcing operations.