Tri-borough agrees £200m deal with BT for London IT framework

BT wins bid to be sole supplier for yet another Tri-borough framework

The Tri-borough, a local government shared services partnership that comprises the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham and Westminster City Council, has selected BT for a new pan-London public sector procurement framework agreement, worth up to £200m.

Customers will be able to select from a range of BT products and services including local and wide area networking, cloud services, fixed and mobile telephony, unified communications and conferencing.

This is the latest of four frameworks set up by the Tri-borough, with BT benefiting hugely from the frameworks, having already signed agreements with Westminster City Council and the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham to manage end user computing and data centre services, and with the London Borough of Islington to provide strategic consultancy services. Earlier this year, Bromley Council selected BT to provide computer and data centre services in a £9m contract - again through a Tri-borough framework. In fact, in this case, as with two of the other Tri-borough frameworks, BT is the sole supplier.

The latest framework is open to all 33 London boroughs and can be used in other public sector bodies in the capital including the NHS, schools, TfL, and the Metropolitan and City Police forces. The aim of the frameworks is to make it easier for an organisation's procurement department to deal with one supplier, so that they don't have to put contracts out to tender and can make savings on the associated time and money spent processing numerous suppliers.

Following another shared services deal between Richmond and Wandsworth councils last week, TechMarketView's John O'Brien suggested that jointly procured shared services ventures by different local authorities were few and far between, because of their complexity.

"The Tri-borough managed service programme between the local boroughs of Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham, which uses Unit 4's Agresso platform, is arguably the only other one today. This however has proved a complex programme with significant implementation challenges," he said.

Computing has contacted Tri-borough CIO Ed Garcez for further comment and will update the story accordingly.