Computacenter wins £12m North Yorkshire council deal

Computacenter has won a six-year deal worth more than £12m to provide a managed IT infrastructure for North Yorkshire County Council.

The deal will be central to the council's strategy for meeting the government's 2005 target for putting public services online.

Computacenter will be responsible for systems installation and maintenance, a desktop refresh for 4,000 PCs and a sever consolidation programme. The services firm will directly manage the council's 35 IT staff that currently handle these parts of the infrastructure and will run a 24-hour IT helpdesk. It will also act as first line support for the rural wireless broadband network currently being implemented by MLL Telecom.

John Moore, director of finance and e-champion at North Yorkshire, said in a statement that the deal will help cut costs by standardising systems.

"NYCC is the largest authority in the UK in geographical terms and our staff and ICT systems are dispersed across more than 400 sites. The partnership with Computacenter will enable us to manage our ICT more efficiently by using standardised systems and service management tools. It will also help free up valuable IT staff time enabling us to focus on new web-based initiatives and application development and support," he said.

A re-training programme is also underway to prepare the council's IT staff for a range of new technologies including Microsoft Windows XP, which will be part of the desktop refresh project.