London Underground maintenance company Tube Lines has renewed an outsourcing contract with Capgemini to continue driving improvements in IT.

The firm first signed a long-term deal with the supplier in 2005 to support an IT transformation programme, and is now extending it for a third two-year period from 2009 to 2011.

According to Tube Lines, the partnership has cut costs by 25 per cent, improved user satisfaction and reduced the number of incidents after the replacement of the legacy IT set-up inherited from LU.

“Driving down costs is a priority for us, as well as looking at ways in which IT can improve the overall efficiency of the organisation,” said Adrian Davey, head of IT at Tube Lines.

Under the new contract, Capgemini will maintain responsibility for the firm’s key corporate systems, but demands going forward are expected to be stricter. “As technology gets more advanced and secure, service-level agreements will increase around server availability,” said Davey.

This year, Tube Lines has completed one of its major IT projects, a desktop PC refresh including an operating system upgrade to Windows Vista.

The company is also rolling out virtualisation technology as an ongoing programme across its desktops and servers. The project supports a green strategy and has so far generated a 60 per cent reduction in energy costs.

The company has two datacentres in north London and Canary Wharf, with 250 Windows servers now reduced by about 30 per cent since the introduction of virtualisation.