Dairy Crest in £2.5m Digica outsourcing deal

Dairy Crest has outsourced its IT infrastructure and applications support to services firm Digica in a three-year, £2.5m deal.

Nottingham-based outsourcer Digica has been responsible for the dairy-food company's order-processing and manufacturing software for the past six years and the new deal is an extension of that relationship.

Digica will now also provide IT infrastructure support and management of the mid-range servers on which Dairy Crest's applications sit, along with a 24-hour helpdesk facility. The servers will be mirrored in a separate data centre to give Dairy Crest a robust disaster recovery capability in the event of a power failure.

Karina Heys, IT infrastructure and operations manager at Dairy Crest, said in a statement that the deal allows the dairy firm to focus on core business operations.

"As a food and drink specialist, we understood at an early stage that our core activity is not the management of IT systems; therefore we have outsourced this function for the last six years," she said.

Digica CEO Mark Howling said the outsourcer's ability to provide 24/7 support was key to winning the deal.