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By Joey Gardiner, 22 March 2000 00:30

NEWS Middleware provider, BEA Systems, has won a £14m contract to shift Abbey National's operations online. The deal will see BEA link up the high-street bank's legacy systems, allowing customers accessing Abbey National via the Web to retrieve information held in back office systems. Neira Benchabane, Abbey National's manager of systems strategy, said the decision to use BEA had been based on an assessment of how IT could be used to deliver business agility and responsiveness. She said: "We have a legacy system built up in various silos of information, so we chose BEA because it gives us the ability to fully integrate all our legacy systems. We really don't see any other companies who are able to provide that for us at the moment." Abbey National will also use BEA to provide a consistent overview of customers. It aims to integrate its call centres, the Internet, branches and hole-in-the-wall ATMs. Benchabane added that BEA's interest in component-based development means the deal could be widened in future. Analysts said the contract demonstrates how successful the company has been in reinventing itself from a low profile back office integrator into an ebusiness enabler. Neil Ward-Dutton, principal consultant at Ovum, said: "BEA is really starting to mark itself out in its area - it is much slicker at presenting itself as an end-to-end service provider." David Burman, director of research at the Butler Group, was surprised at the size of the deal. "Fourteen million pounds really is a lot of money," he said. "Either the Abbey National has money to burn or it is very confident that it will get what it wants out of this contract." BEA said the deal is one of the largest it has signed in the UK.