By Andy McCue, 28 February 2005 10:20
NEWS EDS is reported to be on the verge of landing the £4bn outsourcing deal to run the UK's defence and armed forces IT infrastructure for the next 10 years.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has targeted £174m in efficiency savings through the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) contract, which will overhaul the UK's defence IT infrastructure.
The EDS-led Atlas consortium with Fujitsu Services, EADS, General Dynamics, IBM and LogicaCMG is competing against the CSC-led Radii consortium which includes BT and Thales.
Two separate sources close to the negotiations confirmed last week to silicon.com that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) selection committee has made its final recommendation for the preferred bidder and that a decision is "days away" while it goes through the final approval process.
And reports in the Sunday newspapers claim EDS has beaten off competition from CSC to land the lucrative contract, although the MoD is refusing to comment ahead of any official announcement.
The deal will be a huge boost to EDS, which has lost out on several big UK government IT contracts in recent years, including the £6bn NHS IT programme and the £4bn Inland Revenue deal.
DII will replace 300 diverse information systems across 2,000 locations worldwide, covering some 177,000 desktops and aims to create a unified infrastructure across the UK's armed forces.
One of the key issues for the bidders is risk, with the MoD incorporating strict penalties that allow it to kick out the primary contractor while keeping everything that has been developed up to that point if the project goes wrong.
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Astounding that following the Child Tax Credit and Child Support Reform debacles - both indictments of EDS' ability to deliver major solutions to government - that the lessons have still not been learned.
2. Guy Kirkwood
For a company in such a parlous state financially, and with a "not entirely unblemished" record of in it's previous UK government deals, the CSC bid must have had something terribly wrong with it.
3. Roger Huffadine
Don't be surprised - just be afraid.
4. Martyn Witt
Scary. Thank goodness I'm now a civilian! Still, with our Forces already kitted out with second rate rifles and radios, it would be a consistent choice.
5. John Wilson
No it's not really all that astounding given that all the companies bidding tend to be as bad as one another. What choice doess the government have, or do they even understand what really goes on?
Stories I hear emerging from the NHS project show that the fiascos are reaching previously unheard of heights!
6. anonymous
Hope they have better luck than the US Navy.
7. Ken Hall
I feel that there must be MAJOR bungs going on here. All the large IT cock-ups and the Governemnt still picks the company that messes up?
At least with the UK MoD running microsoft, we may not get involved in much more wars. specially when the orders will come from General Protection Fault.
Or were the MoD's precurment people looking at new weapons and thought that the blue screen of death sounded like a neat weapon?
8. david hunter
Re comment hope they have better luck than US Navy. Having worked within the NavyStar IT project for the last five years, we have delivered a working IT system onboard every UK Naval vessel.
This product has been delivered, installed, set to work and handed over to ship's staff on time and to budget, meeting MOD's specification for every ship.
With the award of this contract, we will continue our dedicated work to ensure our Navy has a coherent and reliable IT system for the next ten years.