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Home Office extends mega 18-year Fujitsu contract

So much for breaking up the SIs then

The Home Office has extended its mega Fujitsu contract to 2018, meaning that when the contract ends it will have been running for the best part of two decades.

That is in contrast to the Cabinet Office's long-standing goal to get government departments to break up their expensive legacy contracts with single suppliers.

The Home Office signed a deal with Fujitsu in 2000, which it extended for five years in 2015 and was due to expire in the first quarter of 2017. The total contract value up to that point was £640m.

Fujitsu provides the hardware and technical support to around 24,000 users, representing about 70 per cent of the Home Office. The department's other main system integrator is Atos, which supplies the application software.

A department spokesman said: "The Home Office is committed to delivering excellent services and value for money for the taxpayer.

"That's why we are ending the culture of awarding large IT contracts to single suppliers and instead working towards smaller, more flexible agreements with a broader list of companies.

"As we make this change, it is important we ensure a smooth transition to these new services. We have therefore extended the transition period of our Fujitsu contract until April 2018."

But one source said the deal was a result of a weakened Government Digital Service, with Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer having approved it himself.

The Register also revealed that the Cabinet Office is gearing up to ink a mega pan-government deal with Oracle.

The department previously told The Register that its strategy is to adopt a policy aligned to the Cabinet Office and Government Digital Service approach of disaggregating large legacy IT contracts into smaller component services "which can be re-competed to capture technical innovation as it emerges, at lowest market cost".

"The department will be the controlling service integrator, managing a mixed economy of collaborating suppliers and Home Office service provision," it said.

But all indications so far suggest it isn't exactly in a hurry to do that. ®

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