Eversheds demands higher standards from Computacenter

Global law firm Eversheds has renewed its IT services contract with Computacenter for a further five years.

The deal was initially signed in 2007, and Paul Caris, CIO at Eversheds, told Computing that the extension incorporates higher service level agreements.

"The scope of the services are essentially going to be the same but the difference is that we have enjoyed an incredibly high level of service in the old contract, and so we thought it would be a good opportunity to bake those additional service improvements into the new contract," said Caris.

"Given that they were over-achieving in the previous deal it felt reasonable to get those improved SLAs into the new deal," he added.

The improved SLAs include telephone support response times and first line fixes.

The service provided by Computacenter includes cradle-to-grave lifecycle management for desktop devices, end user support, datacentre hosting and remote management.

Caris points to staff satisfaction as a key indicator of the benefits the firm had experienced as a result of the IT contract.

"We are now at a consistent 86 per cent customer satisfaction. Evershed staff believe that the service is either good or excellent. Prior to the deal with Computacenter it was about 68 per cent," he said.

The contract is based on a utility billing and on-demand model, allowing Eversheds to modify or terminate aspects of service delivery as and when it needs to.

Caris said this allows his IT department to be more agile.

"I've given up trying to predict the future. For example, we recently deployed more than 500 iPads with Computacenter's systems," said Caris.

"No one could have predicted the iPad – not even Apple. So what we have decided to do is that instead of trying to forecast our roadmap and trying to standardise like most IT departments, we are working out how we can become more agile," he added.

"So when new technologies come in we are able to deploy them very quickly. We demonstrated that with the iPads, we are now trialling Siri [Apple's voice control application on the new iPhone 4S], and we have brought in Skype. We have been able to do this because our infrastructure is adaptable.

"The deal with Computacenter allows us to be far more agile, strategic and innovative. If we want to bring in new technology we can. If we don't like what we have got we can exit it."

Caris said the most challenging part of the deal for Eversheds was establishing a commercial arrangement with Computacenter that made sense for both parties.

"The hard part was getting a commercial deal shaped that suited both organisations," he said.

"I was determined that Computacenter be happy with the deal and make a reasonable margin out of it, because without that we have no standing in their organisation," he added.

"I wouldn't say that they have got high margins, but they have got benchmarked, reasonable margins.

"It was key to establish an agreement that was competitive but also favourable to their shareholders. It took a long time to do that."