Au Bon Pain Corp announced June 22 that it has awarded a three-year contract with Aspeon Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq:ASPE) for its application outsourcing services. The contract is valued at $2.8 million.

Under the terms of the contract, Aspeon will provide Au Bon Pain with financial, payroll, decision support system and catering applications support. The company will also manage Au Bon Pain ‘s data center operations, applications processing and reporting, polling and Oracle database management. In addition, Aspeon will provide networking support for Au Bon Pain’s WAN, LAN, messaging and Internet services.

“Aspeon’s customized solution and knowledge in the foodservice industry made it the natural choice for us to entrust our mission- critical information technology operations,” said Ed Mockler, director of Information Technology for Au Bon Pain. “The quality and performance of Aspeon’s service and product offerings will play an important role in fulfilling our IT objectives.”

“The ASP model is evolving as clients demand their outsourcing partners manage existing legacy systems as the first step in the transition to more cost-effective ASP solutions,” said Richard Stack, chief executive officer of Aspeon.

“This is the first significant recurring revenue contract announcement since creating our dedicated ASP sales team in February 2000. We have strong sales activity in our ASP division and hope to show further evidence of this in the near future.”

Founded in 1978, Au Bon Pain is an urban bakery cafe brand worldwide. With headquarters in Boston, the company currently operates more than 280 Au Bon Pain bakery cafes in the United States, Brazil, Chile, the United Kingdom, Canada and Asia.

Aspeon operates in two lines of business. Aspeon Solutions Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary, is the first “next generation” Application Service Provider (ASP) focused on delivering pre-integrated, mission-critical business applications customized to meet industry-specific needs. Javelin Systems is a provider of integrated touchscreen computers and systems integration services to the global foodservice industry.