The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has awarded the EDS-led Atlas consortium a £4bn outsourcing deal to run its IT infrastructure for the next 10 years.

The Atlas consortium - which also includes Fujitsu Services, LogicaCMG, EADS, General Dynamics, HP and IBM - will manage the MoD's Defence Information Infrastructure (DII), aimed at improving communications between 100,000 civil servants and 200,000 personnel in the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

Atlas will be responsible for overhauling IT infrastructure across 2,000 locations worldwide, including permanent MoD offices, military sites, airbases, battlefields and submarines.

'This group of companies have international experience of delivery of first class IT systems and we look forward to working in partnership with them over the coming years,' said Lord Bach, Minister for Defence and Procurement, in a statement. 'We are particularly pleased that. Once awarded, this contract will sustain over 2000 jobs in the IT sector in the UK.'

The DII project plans to replace numerous standalone systems and create an IT infrastructure capable of securely sharing electronic information across all parts of the department and armed forces. It will link more than 150,000 desktop PCs and laptops.

The deal is one of the UK public sector's biggest technology contracts and will see Atlas also manage local area networks, servers, workstations, printers, software, messaging and core information systems. Email and HR systems such as salary and pensions applications are also expected to be part of the deal.

The group beat the rival Radii consortium, comprising CSC, BT and Thales, following a three-year procurement process (Computing, 2 July 2003).

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