Forestry Commission extends contract with Fujitsu

IT services supplier is tasked with reducing the Commision's annual maintenance budget

The contract will see the Fujitsu reduce the Commision's annual maintenance budget

The Forestry Commission, Britain’s largest land manager, has signed a five-year, £1m contract with Fujitsu to manage its IT estate.

Fujitsu will be responsible for maintaining the Commission's ICT including storage, servers, and its datacentre in Edinburgh. Fujitsu will also be charged with maintaining IT equipment for 2,700 users across 100 distributed offices and depots, including handheld devices, rugged laptops, desktops, printers and plotters.

This expands the scope of an original contract signed in 2003 between Fujitsu and the Forestry Commission and will see the IT services supplier reduce the Commision's annual maintenance budget.

As well as hardware maintenance, Fujitsu will install, test, refresh and upgrade equipment in addition to providing a number of technical consultancy services.

David Felstead, Forestry Commission chief information officer, said: "This five-year contract allows us to continue to provide an excellent service to our internal customers while tackling costs as part of our need to reduce expenditure across the business."

Alastair Millar, service delivery manager at Fujitsu, said: "The Forestry Commission IT estate is a complex one, not only because of the nature of the conditions in which the Commission often works, but also because of the breadth of work for which it is responsible, whether that be research, commercial timber production, sustainability programmes or forestry policy as well as learning and recreation."

The hardware estate comprises more than 2,000 desktop devices and a further 1,000 PDAs, printers and other equipment.