Atkins signs £12m deal for global IP network

Engineering giant is moving to a new centralised IT architecture

The new network will improve capacity

Engineering giant Atkins has signed a £12m deal with Cable & Wireless (C &W) for a global IP network to support 89 sites in the UK and India.

The five-year contract aims to underpin a move to a new centralised IT architecture at the company, and will deliver greater bandwidth and better resilience.

Atkins has to retain a large amount of customer data, and the C&W network will help to improve storage capacity compared to previous systems.

“We needed to move away from disparate and costly legacy processes, to a centralised system while increasing network resilience and storage, ensuring users were not affected,” said Tim Dadswell, IT transition director at Atkins.

C&W will also look after application performance management for Atkins, which will allow the engineering firm to have visibility of the software running over its network for the first time, giving more control and the ability to prioritise business-critical applications. The system will allow Atkins to quickly identify slow-running areas of the network, and which application or server platform is responsible for the problem.