Severn Trent Water to outsource IT

Severn Trent Water is set to outsource the running and development of its IT infrastructure as part of a massive deal that will affect 270 tech staff at the utility.

The outsourcing will be divided into two separate lots and covers operational services, project management, application design, development and planned infrastructure projects such as migrations.

This covers a varied portfolio of more than 200 systems running on a mixture of IBM mainframes, and Unix and Wintel servers using DB2 and Oracle RDBMS. A converged voice over IP network connects 4,500 users across more than 100 sites.

Severn Trent Water has 270 IT staff and a proportion of those will remain in-house but the company is looking for an outsourcer with experience of TUPE staff transfer involving "over 100 IT staff".

A number of projects that are being considered but have not yet been committed as part of the utility's strategic five-year IT investment programme could be included in the outsourcing scope.

These include mainframe migration to Unix, desktop refresh, server consolidation, migration from Lotus Notes mail, graphical information systems, CRM and business intelligence applications.

The outsourcing is expected to be divvied up into one main managed-services contract with a series of smaller development framework agreements for a maximum of 10 years. Up to 10 firms will be invited to bid for the work later this year.

Chris Ford, director of information systems at Severn Trent Water, told silicon.com that he is looking at an ambitious 12 month timescale to complete the procurement to help meet the challenging efficiency targets set by the water industry regulator.

"But it is not just about cost. It is also about access to skills and capabilities that will give us the ability to provide a sustainable service as we move to new technologies and opportunities," he said.

Ford said Severn Trent Water had consulted early with the staff union about the outsourcing move.