Hackney Council is seeking bidders for a £10m IT support
services outsourcing contract.
The east London council is retendering the contract with its
current five-year deal with Northgate Information Solutions, which
is due to end in December.
The new five-year contract will cover installation, support and
maintenance, capacity planning and helpdesk services, along with
database administration, inventory management and IT security for
about 4,000 PCs, 150 fileservers and a data network serving 100
locations.
The council, which is undergoing a major technology review, has
also included development projects in the tender specification.
“Variant bids may include technology refresh, asset ownership,
offsite server hosting, disaster recovery, business continuity
facilities, hardware and software provision and wireless/IP
telephony,” the tender notice says.
Hackney’s record of outsourcing has been troubled. In 2001 it
terminated a £70m council tax and housing benefit contract with
ITNet. The council took the service back in-house after problems
emerged, including a backlog of thousands of housing benefit
cases.
But earlier this month the council signed a five-year £6.5m deal
for a new financial management system to replace its existing
Oracle system. The managed services contract was won by a
consortium led by services specialist Netstore.