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By Nick Heath, 18 June 2009 14:58

NEWS

BAA's tech team have had a busy past year with offshoring a large part of its IT, the opening of Heathrow T5 and the sale of Gatwick Airport.

Service delivery manager, Kevin Mercer, told the Gartner Outsourcing Summit this week how the team were helping steer the UK's largest airport operator through a challenging period.

Last year began with BAA outsourcing the management of about 450 software applications - supporting everything from aircraft management to staff rostering - to Logica.

The cost of maintaining applications this year is expected to be 28 per cent lower than in 2007, thanks to the reduced number of staff needed to look after the applications and through lower wage costs in Logica's offshore delivery centres.

Mercer, who is responsible for looking after IT at BAA's seven UK airports including Heathrow, said: "Having somebody else looking after my critical systems, I did not go into that lightly."

"Whenever I have gone into an outsourcing agreement in the past I wondered whether there were surprises around the corner and whether it was going to end up costing us more but here there is no additional costs and we are making savings," he added.

A number of roles were transferred to Logica in a phased approach from January 2008, first to delivery centres in the UK and to Logica's offshore centres later on that year.

The transition took place while BAA was opening the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow, although Mercer said the additional workload had not contributed to the widely publicised failure of the T5's baggage handling system, thanks to the staggered transfer of systems and staff.

"When T5 opened we were well prepared. It was early days in the contract and we had exactly the same people working in the same location in the UK. We minimised the risk as far as we were concerned," he said.

According to Mercer, BAA has "too many" applications and it is now working with Logica on reducing the number and the cost of maintaining them.

BAA is also splitting the systems and infrastructure used at its largest airport, Heathrow, from those used at its other airports, as it moves away from relying on the same infrastructure and applications across all of its airports.

"We are spending a lot of money maintaining large complex systems at smaller airports such as Southampton, so the IT strategy for Heathrow and other airports will be divided," Mercer said.

Another area of focus for the group is how to uncouple the infrastructure and applications at Gatwick Airport, which BAA has put up for sale, from the rest of its IT systems.

"When talking about infrastructure, divestment is not a small task - splitting the applications and infrastructure is a complex task," Mercer said.

"Logica are heavily involved in the separation of data and the cloning of applications.

"There is a lot of preparation work that we have done to prepare for divestment at Gatwick and maybe other airports in future."

Mercer and the IT team will retain responsibility for supporting Gatwick's IT systems for 18 months after the sale has gone through.

Cost reduction is also another priority for BAA, and will take the form of "improving processes, further offshoring, better procurement and virtualisation and simplification of infrastructure," according to BAA.