United Utilities is looking for suppliers for five-year IT framework contracts covering consultancy, system integration, infrastructure services and support.

Consultancy will cover customer relationship management and transformation, while implementation deals will include disaster recovery and converged networks.

There would also be installations, upgrades or replacements of network hardware and telephony systems from Nortel, Cisco, Avaya and Siemens.

“Framework contracts will be awarded to suppliers for one or more of the services. All works will be instructed in packages which will be subject to mini-competition between the framework holders for the relevant services,” said the company.

The plan calls for server upgrade or replacement to support Windows Server, Sun Solaris and IBM AIX. Software covers SAP ERP 6, CRM 2007, Oracle 10g databases and Java and .Net software development.

United was created in 1995 from the merger of North West Water and Norweb.
The £1bn firm operates electricity, water and waste water networks in north west England. It runs IBM iSeries mainframes at its Warrington headquarters and employs about 50 IT staff.

The firm announced a nine-month deal with Infosys in December to upgrade its operations management systems using service-oriented architecture (SOA).