Capgemini lands five-year, £26m outsourcing contract with esure

Contract has seen a massive data migration following the split with Lloyds banking group

Esure wins hands-down outsourcing IT to Capgemini datacentres

Capgemini has helped UK insurance firm esure to migrate its IT platform from an IT estate shared with Lloyds Banking Group, onto two Capgemini datacentres as part of a contract worth £26m.

The contract will continue to run over the next five years and was struck as esure planned its management buyout from Lloyds banking group.

According to the company, business benefits for the online insurance company will include better service, energy cost savings owing to virtualisation and improved disaster recovery.

Esure underwent a management buyout in February which saw it split from the Lloyds Banking Group. The migration began in August 2009 and was finished in March 2010.

Esure head of IT Mark Foulsham said: “We wanted to have our own discrete systems, giving us our own service-level agreements.”

Capgemini's two datacentres are based in London City and London Southbank and are connected by two dual-gigabit fibre links for disaster recovery. The network connections are overseen by BT, but the actual contract with BT is managed by Capgemini.

The new hardware includes a Sun Solaris environment, with Unix systems management based on IBM Tivoli Workload Schedulers, and a new Wintel estate involving Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, BlackBerry and content management.

Esure also gets helpdesk and incident management support from Capgemini service centres in Inverness and Nairn, Scotland.

Foulsham explained that about 90 per cent of the insurance company’s servers are virtualised using VMware.

The infrastructure managed by Capgemini runs all the esure core applications, including finance systems and its customer-facing online and call centre policy administration and acquisition systems.

These include sales, marketing, web site content, quotations and claims management. Capgemini also manages esure’s telephony systems including call management, via a subcontractor.

Foulsham said that the main challenge was always going to be the data migration.

“We transferred the data incrementally, but the overriding concern was to ensure we did not disrupt the business,” he said.

Capgemini maintains the IT from the operating systems downwards, while esure’s IT team deals with the systems from the application level upwards.

“We still have a service management and infrastructure function team that monitors normal day-to-day operations on our web site and call centre applications,” said Foulsham.

However, overnight and at the weekends, this is handled by Capgemini.

“Although we’re going for like for like in terms of functionality, we wanted to reduce the energy footprint and number of physical servers,” added Foulsham.