Industry news

Lincolnshire Police Authority has selected security firm G4S as a preferred bidder for a £200m outsourcing contract to provide services to support front line policing.

The deal – the first of its kind in the UK – will see middle and back office functions provided by the company for the next ten years. It is likely that further forces will follow suit.

Serco is set to win the East England NHS Trust partnership contract, worth up to £400 million.

In March 2011, the contract to operate the Anglia Support Partnership was offered up for tender. The contract was valued at between £75 million and £400 million. The tender document revealed that ASP turns over £34 million a year, and owns assets worth £3.8 million.

BNP Paribas has implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine to manage electronic trading floor data.

Electronic trading floor data volume is based largely on volatility, and 2011 has been a volatile year for financial markets. BNP Paribas' data warehouse manages billions of messages in real-time processing a Terabyte of raw data daily. A half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine has helped BNP Paribas better manage this data growth and improve system performance.

EarthLink, Inc, a leading IT services and communications provider, has announced that it has completed the acquisition of the IT Solution Center and hosted application business from Synergy Global Solutions.

The IT Solution Center is comprised of a Help Desk, Network Operations Center, and remote technical management and support across a wide range of networking and operating system platforms. EarthLink has also acquired Synergy's cloud-based application service, which provides end-to-end hosted IT capabilities for the environmental services vertical market. Under the terms of this agreement, EarthLink acquires relationships with approximately 120 Value Added Resellers (VARs) that currently sell the Solution Center and hosted application services.

"With the close of this strategic acquisition, we intend to leverage the Solution Center's competency providing leading-edge IT support services and rapidly expand these nationwide in combination with our cloud, security and network connectivity solution to our customers," commented Brian Fink , EarthLink Executive Vice President of Managed Services. "Adding such a skilled and seasoned team, with years of IT services expertise, will be a major benefit as we integrate this offering into our managed services portfolio."

A union fears conditions for civilian staff at Lincolnshire Police could be "eroded" when half transfer to a private company.

In a cost-saving deal thought to be the first of its kind, the police authority is awarding a £200m 10-year outsourcing contract to security firm G4S.

G4S said staff would keep their existing terms and conditions when they transfer on 1 April.

John Gooding, chairman of the Unison branch at Lincolnshire Police, said: "Our members will transfer on their current terms and conditions but as they retire, leave or voluntarily change jobs, then you can dilute the terms and conditions and the working conditions that people do a job under. So gradually it can be eroded - things that we have negotiated over the last 40 years."

Nine of the Derbyshire councils who are part of the Derbyshire Transformational Partnership* have been working with Capita to conduct a single person’s council tax discount review.

Capita reviewed 135,000 cases of single person discount eligibility. 6,545 claimants were found to not be entitled to the discount and these have now been removed. This has generated additional revenue for the councils of £2.5million.

Kath Gruber, director of customer management at Derby City Council, commented: “In these difficult financial times it is important that councils make every effort to ensure that deliberate attempts to unfairly claim single person discount are identified. We want to ensure that only those entitled to council tax discount receive it, so the vast majority of residents who pay their full council tax each year do not have to subsidise those who choose to claim discounts they are not entitled to. This review has created significant additional council tax income, which can be put back into front line services and help keep council tax as low as possible.”

The UK government has announced the 14 cities eligible to bid for money to make themselves "super-connected".

Chancellor George Osborne said in his Autumn Statement that he was making £100m available to create 100Mbps (megabits per second) citywide networks in 10 urban areas.

It forms part of government plans to kickstart the economy

Among cities eligible to bid are Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle.

The four UK capitals - London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast - had already been announced. The others on the list are Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester and Sheffield.

The National Audit Office has commended the early progress being made by the Government in implementing its ICT Strategy but has identified areas where progress has not kept pace with the Government’s ambitions.

Launched six months ago, in March 2011, the Strategy is intended to tackle systemic problems in government ICT projects which in the past have tended to be too big, lengthy, risky and complex. Departments have independently developed systems which have often not communicated easily with one another. The broad aim of the Strategy is to reduce waste and project failure, create a common ICT infrastructure for government and use ICT to change how public services are delivered.

NAO believes there are also a number of areas where not enough progress has been made. The Cabinet Office has not yet developed a system for measuring the extent to which the Strategy is resulting in sustained change. Government has also been managing the resources to implement the Strategy informally up to now and, without a clear resource plan, gaps may start to hinder progress. Gaps in ICT skills in the public sector also remain a serious challenge.

HCL Technologies has announced that it has been selected by AstraZeneca, one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical company, as a strategic infrastructure outsourcing partner. HCL will be responsible for the provision, management and transformation of AstraZeneca’s global Hosting and Collaboration environment.

As part of the five year engagement, HCL will be responsible for managing AstraZeneca’s entire Data Centre environment across over 60 locations globally including hosting and migration of some of the existing large Data Centers into state-of-the-art facilities. In addition, HCL will manage AstraZeneca’s global Collaboration environment including Email, Messaging and Collaboration Services for users worldwide. HCL will also deliver transformational projects including Server Virtualisation, Storage and Backup transformation and implementation of the hybrid cloud.

"We are delighted to partner with AstraZeneca in their technology transformation journey. This win is a testimony to HCL’s leadership in Global infrastructure services market and its critical investments in developing next generation Intellectual properties such as myCloud™ and MTaaS™. We continue with our commitment to Infrastructure outsourcing market and focus on large, complex & transformational engagements.” said Mr. R Srikrishna, Executive Vice President and Head - Global Infrastructure services, HCL ISD, HCL Technologies.

Lincolnshire police authority has made security specialist G4S its preferred bidder in an outsourcing deal that will include ICT, back office and command and control and could be developed into a shared service for other police forces in the country.

The company is on course to land a 10 year, strategic partnership contract valued at more than £200m. It beat off competition from a partnership between Steria and Reliance Security to win the deal.