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By Andy McCue, 17 October 2003 16:49

NEWS Travel group Thomas Cook is set to save £1m a year with the roll-out of a new high-speed IP network from BT. The IP data backbone will connect Thomas Cook's strategic headquarters, four call centres, two data centres, 17 UK airports and 643 high-street shops using ADSL and ISDN. The project is expected to be completed by the end of this month and replaces a mainly frame-relay network provided by Energis as a managed service. Carl Dawson, IT director at Thomas Cook, told silicon.com the new network will not only take running costs down from £4.2m to £3.2m but will allow more modern applications to be delivered across the group to staff. "We paid quite a lot for frame relay," he said. "[The new network] will increase the bandwidth. There are currently only 64k lines to the shops and that is not good enough for what we want to do." Instead, 1Mb and 2Mb pipes have been put in allowing the firm to rollout web and email access to the travel shops. Thomas Cook is also in the middle of a back-end SAP implantation, which will see the rollout of the MySAP.com portal and a range of self-service HR and payroll features that staff can access from their desktop. The high-speed network will also support the rollout of new sales applications at Thomas Cook next summer. Dawson said web and email access will be run over the new network to staff straightaway, while the SAP applications will be done gradually over the next six months to allow for staff training in how to use them.