The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) is to outsource its entire communications infrastructure in a £1.85m deal.

The three-year managed service contract with NTL will let the organisation concentrate on providing examination and assessment services to members worldwide, while consolidating and upgrading its disparate legacy voice and data systems.

ACCA's four UK offices will be connected using NTL¡s Nationwide Ethernet, for higher network availability, performance and management.

ACCA IT director Mark Devine says the organisation's ageing communications infrastructure was due a refresh, and that a managed service approach seemed the most natural choice.

As well as bandwidth services, ACCA is moving its call charging to NTL as part of the deal.

'In the past, people have said you shouldn¡t put all your eggs into one basket,' said Devine. 'But that depends on the confidence you have in the basket. Using billing and infrastructure services from different providers over the past few years has proved difficult.'

Devine says the deal simplifies supplier relations into one point of contact, allowing ACCA to use standard technology components managed centrally.

The NTL Ethernet infrastructure will power real-time collaboration between ACCA's sites, together with secure, centralised storage.

According to Devine, it will also make the deployment of distributed applications easier, and provide more reliable services to ACCA members.

'There are 100,000 people around the world whose careers may be depending on our exam results,' he said.

Devine says the enhanced network availability will accommodate peaks in demand for the services ACCA offers online, such as examination results.

'Thirty per cent of our revenue has moved to the internet, so I see this deal as a massive platform for growth,' he said.