Credit: Pxhere

The Home Office has signed a £70m long-term deal with Capgemini for the long-term support and transformation of its datacentre infrastructure.

The contract, which came into effect on 13 December, is intended to provide the department with single supplier of “support services, engineering, migration and transformation” across the breadth of the Home Office’s hosting facilities.

Recently published commercial documents reveal that this includes two dedicated datacentres hosted in facilities provided Crown Hosting – a public sector platform part-owned by the government. Also part of the department’s current computing infrastructure estate is an unspecified third-party facility in which the Home Office is a tenant. The Capgemini deal provides for additional datacentres and locations to be brought in scope over the course of contract.

As and when such facilities are added, “one of the primary requirements of this contract is to enable choices for the [Home Office] in relation to the consolidation of resources,” the contract said. 

“With a cloud-first policy, there is a preferred option of deployment in public-cloud environments,” it added. However, in some cases, there is a requirement for alternative strategies and outcomes dependent on the service itself, available resources and developing requirements.”

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The document indicated that, in its two Crown-hosted datacentres, technology upgrade programmes are already underway in a bid to “remove technical debt and to pave the way for a wider infrastructure transformation programme – [focused on] private cloud – to coincide with a natural refresh junction”.

“The [Home Office’s] strategic direction is to continue the digital transformation of services, adopt innovative technologies, provide secure hosting services based on a consumption model, and support for on-premise infrastructure – on-premise and private cloud – in our strategic datacentres,” the contract said.

Capgemini will be asked to provide “a single, scalable team… to deliver service support in all locations required” – including existing locations and those that may be added in the future, the contract said. 

After management of the relevant services has been successfully transitioned to the IT firm, the engagement will be comprised of two main components: service support and continuous service improvement (CSI); and engineering, migration and transformation.

“The support service and CSI component of the contract… will enable a culture of continuous improvements, improved product development, increased resilience and availability, reduction in manual processes and increased automation, extended product catalogue offering, improved productivity and reduce TCO (total cost of ownership),” the contract said.

“The engineering and transformation component of the contract… will enable a culture of faster deployment, use product centric practices, enable early defect detection and deliver improved quality, improved productivity and streamlined processes, increased innovation and improved collaboration.”

The deal with Capgemini will run for an initial term of three years, at a cost of £70m. The department has the option of signing two extensions of up to 12 months each.

Headquartered in Paris, Capgemini is one of the world’s largest IT services and consultancy firms, with sales of €15.85bn (£13.25bn). 

Data from the government’s Contracts Finder database show that, as well as the Home Office contract, in the last six months, the company has won two deals with HM Revenue and Customs worth £108m in total, various contracts with the Department for Work and Pensions and its arm’s-length bodies worth a collective £50m-plus, and smaller engagements with the likes of Defra, the Department for Transport, Ofsted, and the UK Health Security Agency.