Sweden’s Bisnode consolidates outsourced IT

Sweden-headquartered company Bisnode has decided to bring multiple IT outsourcing arrangements under a single supplier contract.

Bisnode, which provides data services to businesses to help them make decisions, has chosen CGI to manage its IT in Sweden. The 215m SEK (£28m) deal will see a handful of different contracts with multiple suppliers brought under CGI for five and a half years.

Bisnode conducted an external audit and decided CGI could offer everything it required from one place. CGI will offer cloud-based delivery model that is flexible and demand-driven.

Robert Burén, CIO at Bisnode, said CGI was already one of the company’s IT services suppliers, so it understood the business. “CGI’s team is also very proactive in providing suggestions for improvement.”

He said one of CGI’s lead IT architects will be based on-site “to keep us well-informed of issues and recommend innovative systems for driving our IT performance”.

Burén said by outsourcing IT, the company gains access to expertise unavailable in-house and, at the same time, frees up resources so it can focus on its own offering.

“By outsourcing our technology management services to CGI, we gain a number of operational benefits that we would never be able to achieve by keeping operations in-house,” he said.

“Streamlining our IT function is in line with our objective to simplify our business, so that we can devote more energy and resources to developing our digital data services.”

The services will be delivered from a CGI datacentre in Sweden with a 24-hour service. The service will support Bisnode’s existing business in the Nordic region as CGI has operations in the same countries and will help take its offering international through a global IT presence.