Britain’s largest land manager, the Forestry Commission, has awarded Fujitsu a new five-year contract to maintain all of its ICT hardware across the Commission in England, Scotland and Wales. Fujitsu originally won the six-year contract to run the Forestry Commission’s IT in 2003. The new contract was won in a competitive tender through the Catalist framework.
Fujitsu will be responsible for maintaining the Commission’s whole ICT investment including storage, servers, and its data centre in Edinburgh. Coupled with this, Fujitsu will be maintaining IT equipment for 2,700 users across 100 distributed offices and depots, including handheld devices, rugged laptops, desktops, printers and plotters.
This new contract broadens the scope of the original contract and requires Fujitsu both to meet improved services targets and to reduce the overall annual maintenance budget. As well as maintaining the hardware for the Commission, Fujitsu will be undertaking installation, testing, refresh, upgrade and disposal work on a call-off basis along with a number of technical consultancy services. The contract is worth £1m.
David Felstead, Forestry Commission CIO, said: “We are delighted to re-appoint Fujitsu as our hardware maintenance partners. This five year contract allows us to continue to provide an excellent service to our internal customers whist tackling costs as part of our need to reduce expenditure across the business. We are convinced this continuing partnership will allow us to achieve all of our improved service and commercial objectives.”
Commenting on the contract, Alastair Millar, service delivery manager at Fujitsu UK and Ireland said: “The Forestry Commission IT estate is a complex one, not only because of the nature of the conditions the Commission often works in, but also because of the breadth of work it is responsible for, whether that be research, commercial timber production, sustainability programmes and forestry policy as well as learning and recreation.
This breadth makes it a fascinating organisation to work with as every IT users’ needs are different and varied. We look forward to continuing the good work we have undertaken with the Forestry Commission since 2003 and helping support them in the outstanding work they are doing in sustaining the forestry resource for the future.”
The hardware estate comprises over 2,000 desktop devices and a further 1,000 PDA’s printers and other equipment.
Key facts about Forestry Commission:
– Cares for 827,000 hectares of sustainably managed woods and forests – that’s more than 1.4 billion trees
– Plants more than 17 million trees every year
– Employs more 3,000 people – most of them in rural areas
– Produces more than 5 million tonnes of timber every year. That is almost 44% of UK wood production or 300 forty-tonne truckloads of timber every day
– Welcomes more than 50 million visitors every year
– Provides 2,600 km of cycle trails
– Has 55 visitor centres, almost 500 car parks, and 155 easy access trails
– Provides 109 forest classrooms or educational facilities
– Maintains 24,000 km of forest roads – seven times the total amount of motorway in Britain. If it were possible to put them together, they would stretch more than halfway around the world
– Welcomes more than 100,000 per year to our concerts in the forest
– Maintains more than 2,300 bridges
– Helped expand Britain’s woodlands by an area more than three times the size of greater London in the last 20 years
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