18 February 2005 The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has signed a £180 million deal with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to run its IT infrastructure for the next seven years.
Under the terms of the contract, HP will work alongside the FCO’s in-house IT team. HP will take on responsibility for overall management of the service, while lead responsibility for individual services elements will be allocated on the basis of which member of the partnership is best placed to deliver.
Alongside its UK offices, the FCO has over 200 overseas posts.
“Having the right IT and high quality services to support it will be critical in helping us realise the FCO Strategy over the next decade,” said the FCO Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Michael Jay.
HP is charged with rolling out new hardware, software and services to all FCO offices over a two-year period. The deal runs for a total of seven years.
The new system will be called Future Firecrest, and will update current Windows-based infrastructure, Firecrest, which covers 11,000 FCO desktops.
HP beat off competition from a consortium led by the Science Applications International Corporation during the two year procurement process. It won the deal just a week after CEO Carly Fiorina stepped down after a disagreement with HP’s board over the company’s strategy.
