Network Rail has signed five-year deals with two IT firms, outsourcing two areas of its business areas, the firm has announced.
Network Rail, the state-owned operator of railway infrastructure in Britain, awarded one contract to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to deliver enterprise operations, and the second to Specialist Computer Centres (SCC) for distributed computing. For both contracts, Network Rails current IT staff will be kept on transfer.
CSC will deliver Oracle support and midrange services, such as server maintenance, data centre hosting, security, disaster recovery planning and storage area network management. The switchover will happen over six months starting this October, with 70 Network Rail IT employees transferring to CSC. The contract will also involve 4 million in infrastructure investment, the rail firm said.
"We have always been clear that our preferred supplier in this area must engage in our development and change programme as well as keep the critical systems running" said Catherine Doran, director of information management at Network Rail in a statement.
Also starting in October, SCC will run Network Rail's distributed computing and maintain their network of desktops, including support for hardware, office moves, asset handovers and local delivery of projects.
"We recognise that quality IT delivery has to be reliable and seamless for our customers from the data centre to the desktop" said Doran. "In selecting SCC, we will be working as one like minded team with drive and commitment to achieve our shared objectives and goals."
