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New contracts bring £1bn savings over 10 years to Defence

New IT contracts for the MoD will bring savings of £1bn that will be directly reinvested in defence capability.

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The Ministry of Defence has signed two new contracts for its IT and communications supply that will bring huge savings of over £1bn over 10 years as well as significantly improving capability. All the savings made will be reinvested directly into Defence, helping to bring new equipment and programmes into fruition, ultimately helping to keep Britain safe.

The ATLAS Consortium, a collaborative team led by HP and including Fujitsu, Airbus Defence and Space and CGI, will provide a secure New Style of IT (NSoIT) to the majority of Defence users in offices, headquarters and deployed bases by September 2016. This New Style of IT is a contract worth £933m and is a renegotiation of the original extension of the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) contract.

Fujitsu has been awarded a contract worth in excess of £550m to provide our core global connectivity services for the next five years. A further announcement will follow on the award of a contract for voice, video and mobile phone elements which will complement the other capabilities being delivered and allow our military and civilian users to exploit them to their fullest potential.

The new contracts transform the delivery of information and communication technology across Defence, providing a new IT system fully exploiting the power of cloud computing, along with Microsoft Office 365 software, and securely delivering greater agility and mobility to our service personnel wherever they may be. This move is a significant upgrade of current capability and will put Defence on the front foot with its industry partners to deal with global threats to national security.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said:

We must keep pace with those who pose a threat to UK security, whether overt or cyber-based. The new contracts will enhance our fighting capability and make us more efficient in our work.

Alongside this enhanced capability we have managed to secure huge savings of £1bn over ten years. All of this money will be reinvested back into Defence, ultimately helping keep Britain safe.

The new contracts have been split into two projects: New Style of IT (NSoIT); and Global Connectivity. The project known as NSoIT was established to renegotiate the continuation of our secure IT systems, bringing in huge savings from the original contract whilst also delivering significantly improved and new capability. The project known as Global Connectivity was established to ensure best continuation of ICT services after the Defence Fixed Telecommunications Service (DFTS) contract ends in July 2016. An announcement on Integrated User Services that underpins both NSoIT and Global Connectivity will be made in due course.

Integrated User Services contract

Following on from the two New Style of IT (NSoIT) contracts announced earlier this week, the Ministry of Defence has now signed the Integrated User Services contract to provide voice, video and mobile phone services for the next five years.

The contract, worth in excess of £330m, was awarded to BT under the Cabinet Office Public Services Network (PSN) framework, and completes the commercial foundations necessary to underpin the NSoIT plans.

Published 3 August 2015
Last updated 5 August 2015 + show all updates
  1. Further contract announcement added

  2. First published.