BBC awards £600m licence contract to Envision

The BBC has awarded a contract for the collection of licence fees to Envision - a consortium comprising Bull Information Systems, the UK Post Office's Subscription Services (SSL) division, and media and marketing giant, WPP Group.

The seven-year agreement is thought to be worth close to £600m, and will come into effect next April.

Envision beat rival EDS in the final stages of selection, while Andersen Consulting was ruled out before the shortlist was drawn up.

The BBC said the Envision deal will lead to innovation and improved efficiency. However, separate deals will remain in place for over-the-counter licence fee payments at post offices and Paypoint outlets.

Barry Grisdale, Bull's CEO, said Envision will take 12 months to replace IBM mainframes running the existing Licence Application System (Lassy) with a system called Trace, based on Bull Escala PowerPC AIX Unix servers. The system will be fronted by Windows NT Web servers which access an Oracle database.

Grisdale added: "We're also looking to have a call centre and Web-enabled system. At first, we'll use an intranet and then possibly move on to an Internet-based system to streamline processes. We don't have the green light to use the Net yet, but this is a seven year contract, and we're making provision for the future."

Trace has been designed to issue 40 million items of mail each year, and handle responses to 110,000 customer enquiries each week.