EDS "to clinch MoD contract "
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'Biggest government IT project ever' to go to Atlas consortium.
28 February 2005 A consortium led by IT services giant Electronic Data Systems (EDS) looks set to seal the contract to provide the UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) with its new £4 billion IT system, according to reports.
The Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) contract will replace 300 separate information systems across 2,000 global locations, covering over 170,000 desktops. The 10-year deal will create a unified infrastructure across the UK's armed forces.
The deal is likely to be worth £4 billion over the life of the contract, and would be a welcome fillip for embattled EDS, which has not fared well in recent UK public sector projects.
According to The Sunday Times the MoD will announce that the EDS-led Atlas Consortium has won the contract shortly.
The Texas-based IT services company has been involved in a number of high profile project failures, including the administration and payment system it built for the UK's Child Support Agency. It also lost out on its bid to renew its deal to run the Inland Revenues IT systems, and also failed to win any of the contracts to build IT systems for the NHS.
It was revealed last year that the Ministry of Defence had negotiated an unprecedented "no failure" clause while discussing the DII contract with EDS. This clause gives the MoD the right to scrap all or parts of the contract should they find fault with the service EDS provides.
"If the system crashes and EDS is deemed incompetent, the MoD has the ability to take the work away from us and give it to our second partner, Fujitsu," EDS Defence managing director Graham Lay said at the time.
