Randstad
Employment Bureau expects to cut annual IT costs by 40% after
becoming the first UK user to sign up to IBM’s Desktop Management
Service, in a three-year deal worth around £900,000.
The UK arm of the
world's fourth-largest employment agency is replacing its existing
IT infrastructure, which is made up of a number of disparate
systems, with IBM hardware and software, managed on a monthly price
per seat basis by the supplier.
Randstad expected
to save around £650,000 a year as a result of using the service to
standardise its IT infrastructure, said Patrick Green, director of
business services at the company.
“We had quite an
antiquated IT infrastructure with a mish-mash of different systems
there as a result of an acquisition in 2001,” he said. “Offering
effective IT support has been difficult as it would take a long
time to work out what the problem actually was. The IBM deal will
give us flexibility as we have a lot of disparate users.”
Under the terms of
the deal, which was announced yesterday (21 April), IBM will be
responsible for the deployment of 450 IBM S50 desktop PCs, 50 IBM
R40 ThinkPads, 120 IBM Infoprint 1352 printers and 90 IBM xSeries
servers.
IBM will also
manage all aspects of the company's data migration, IT management,
helpdesk support, asset reporting and anti-virus protection.
The new
infrastructure will support Randstad’s growth targets, which will
see an estimated 200 new users added over the next three years,
Green said.
The initial
implementation of the equipment is expected to be complete by
June. At the end of the contract, Randstad will be able to choose
between fully purchasing the systems, returning them or partially
replacing them with new equipment depending on the company's
requirements at that time.
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