Bank of Ireland in €151m BT networks deal

The long-running saga of outsourcing deals awarded by Bank of Ireland is drawing to a close with BT securing a €151m, seven-year deal.

Esat BT's contract covers disaster recovery infrastructure, IP telephony and virtual private networking (VPN) technology that uses a standard called MPLS (Multiprotocol label switching) for speed and flexibility.

It will sit alongside an IT outsourcing deal worth $600m won by HP, which resulted in protests from affected staff last September that almost turned into a full strike.

Cyril Dunne, Bank of Ireland CIO, told silicon.com: "BT understood our business and where we're trying to go well. They also knew what was needed to operate a three-way relationship."

Bank of Ireland visited reference sites relating to a number of successful BT IP VPN contracts around the world in the last couple of years.

"We were conscious BT hadn't taken on a managed service contract like this in Ireland but [the reference sites] helped a lot," Dunne added.

The bank, which does about 30 per cent of its business in the UK, will see 11 employees move across to BT now, joining around 440 IT staff who are joining the ranks of HP.

Requests for proposal (RFPs) went out as far back as November 2002 and by April last year the bank had identified its preferred suppliers. Since that time it has been doing due diligence and making sure any transition to its partners goes as smoothly as possible.

Bank of Ireland is a current customer of BT's. In the UK it operates the Bristol & West, Chase de Vere and other brands.