Computacenter in line for major council outsourcing win

Computacenter has been named as the Preferred Bidder for a five year contract to deliver ICT services to Cumbria County Council when its existing contract comes to an end on 31st March 2012.

 

Cumbria announced it decision to move away from a large outsourced contract in August 2010 and split procurement of its ICT contract into two lots; one for the provision of ICT services to the council worth around £60m and another for the support of a county-wide initiative to provide public sector networks across Cumbria and superfast broadband across the County worth a similar amount.

 

Shortlisted bidders for the contracts included BT Global Services, Commendim, Fujitsu and CSC. Incumbent supplier, Agilisys, which has been the Council’s ICT supplier since 2005, was not included on the shortlist announced in June 2011. Though a press release issued by the Council said: “All credit has to go to the current supplier (Agilisys) who has served us well over the last five years and who have made a significant contribution to the council’s improvement journey."

 

Georgina O’Toole, an analyst at TechMarketView, said in a blog post, “It strikes us that the Council was looking for a very different type of supplier at re-tender in order to support the next phase of its ICT strategy. The next phase of Cumbria’s ICT strategy has a heavy focus on transforming the Council’s use of technology in order to support, for example, smart working, greening its ICT and self service enablement. It also needs to deliver its ICT with less resource.”

 

Computacenter is expected to earn around £10m in the first year of the contract (2012/13), giving a significant boost to the integrator's UK public sector revenues, which TechMarketView estimates stood at about £90m in 2011.