BT nets lucrative public sector contracts

13-05-2008

by Bryan Collins

BT has signed three deals with the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel (DFP), worth over STG16 million, to manage its IT services.

BT signed a seven-year STG10 million contract with the DFP to manage two data centre services in Belfast. In other deals, worth in excess of STG6 million, BT is to supply up to 10,000 PCs and 4,000 encrypted laptops to the department.

The STG10 million contract will see BT move the Northern Ireland Civil Service's infrastructure and data services from six sites in various government departments to two Belfast-based data centres. These two centres will support the work of over 18,000 civil servants in 11 government departments across the region.

The competitive tender process was won by BT in December. The company determined that two data centres would best serve the ICT Shared Service Centre set up by the DFP, to operate hosting and storage for the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NCIS).

"The Northern Ireland civil service is doing an awful lot in the public sector to use IT communications to radically transform how citizens are offered service. They have quite a detailed specific plan and that has led to a number of contracts being awarded over the past few years. There is a significant activity up that side of the border," Chris Clark, CEO of BT told ENN.

The new Belfast data centres will consolidate the NICS's server infrastructure and line of business storage requirements as a hosted managed service. This will meet the NICS's security, compliance, and disaster recovery needs. The data centres will also allow the NCIS to consolidate individual department e-mails into one new domain name. The first of these data centres was officially opened by the minister for finance and personnel, Peter Robinson last week. The other centre has been in operation for several years, providing services to the public and private sector.

"The BT data centres will underpin Northern Ireland's public sector transformation programme and the mission critical applications that we are rolling out," said Caron Alexander, head of technology and expert Services in IT Assist.

BT has also designed a personalised training video, SafeSecureProtect for the civil service. This will be made available to 30,000 NICS staff to teach them about the significance of data protection, as a citizen and a public service representative.

"It is the continuation of a very successful partnership that we have had with BT in the IT arena for many years" said Bill McCluggage, Director of Delivery and Innovation Division, at the NCIS's Department of Finance and Personnel.