The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has selected Steria to build a new IT infrastructure and provide managed IT services in a £30m five-year contract.
Steria, which beat off competition from Fujitsu Services and Unisys, to secure the deal, will design develop and implement a new IT structure for the department and provide a fully managed IT service to more than 3,000 ODPM employees in offices across the UK.
ODPM is seeking to cut costs and improve efficiency over the lifetime of the contract through more effective use of IT and changed business practices.
Under the contract Steria will build a new Microsoft Exchange-based infrastructure, dubbed Link, covering the ODPM’s head office and regional sites. Data will be transferred from the existing Novell/Groupwise infrastructure to the MS Exchange Link system, which is expected to be in full use by the end of 2006.
Steria will also develop an electronic document and records management system, making it easier to share information between directorates that currently use different information storage systems.
The firm will oversee the ODPM’s wide and local area networks and provide a new remote access system to allow increased mobile working.
Steria has hired management consultancy Capgemini as a subcontractor to support the expected business changes.
