Serco outsources IT infrastructure and transformation

Business service provider Serco has contracted SunGard to take responsibility for its UK IT infrastructure in an agreement that will support Serco in increasing its internal cloud services and establishing cloud services for its customers.

The deal will give business services supplier Serco access to resources on demand for its internal and customer facing operations.

The company has reduced its five UK datacentres to two and handed responsibility to SunGard, which will take over the delivery of internal IT services to Serco’s staff and manage platforms that customers of Serco’s outsourcing services consume.

Garry Finglan, CIO at Serco, said the company had identified it wanted to harness the cloud both internally and for its services to customers. 

“We have already used common delivery platforms, which are often multi-tenanted, but we wanted to move to the next generation of the cloud,” said Finglan.

He said the company decided to outsource to enable it to get to achieve this quicker and securely. 

“SunGard was a good partner because of its experience of providing secure and resilient datacentres. It is a safer and faster route to what we wanted.” 

SunGard’s large financial services customer base is evidence of the trust it has in the market. SunGard also gives Serco access to more resources on demand.

Serco has reduced the number of UK datacentres from five to two and SunGard has now taken control of these.

Fingland said a specialist supplier was better positioned to support Serco’s plans. 

“As an established provider of managed availability services, SunGard can offer a more scalable, accessible and innovative datacentre offering for our customers.”

Fingland said Serco will use the cloud to develop multi-tenant platforms for different business services that it offers customers. 

“We will start transforming our services to customers through the cloud.” 

For example, he said Serco customers that receive facilities management services from Serco might have be on the same cloud-based platform.

The first phase of the transformation will see SunGard implement a private and managed public cloud, based on SunGard Enterprise Cloud and Managed Hosting Services. It will also gain access to SunGard’s recovery services.