CIO interview: How Balfour Beatty will rationalise servers and applications in £50m deal with Fujitsu

Construction giant hopes to slash number of servers in half and cut thousands of applications

Global construction company Balfour Beatty has selected Fujitsu to aid a five-year IT rationalisation project worth between £40m and £50m to the technology company.

The project is part of a wider programme to roll out IT shared services across the UK. The programme began 18 months ago, and Fujitsu will support the continued rollout, while also aiming to help reduce Balfour Beatty's IT costs by 25 per cent or £10m a year by 2015.

Balfour Beatty CIO Danny Reeves told Computing that the programme is focused on standardising the company's end-user computing and hosting environments to enable staff to get hold of data faster, more effectively, and in a more collaborative way.

"This will allow us to provide information to our customers that enables them to make better decisions, and for us to make better decisions on behalf of our customers," he said.

The project

Balfour Beatty has 14,000 staff in the UK who use various different devices, with the bulk of the desktops and laptops running Microsoft Windows XP. The project will therefore involve the standardisation of all desktops and laptops on Windows 7.

Fujitsu will also provide desktop services and support to about 450 permanent locations and 450 temporary sites.

The company has 1,500 servers spread across 10 main data rooms and, in the next 18 months, it aims to standardise and halve the number of physical servers and move to a virtualised environment.

In the process, the company will move its servers into two core Fujitsu datacentres. This combination of virtualisation and third-party hosting ought to help drive down costs and reduce the company's energy bills.

Reeves said he also hopes to drive efficiencies through a reduction of Balfour Beatty's application estate.

"Because we have grown so fast in the past 20 years, through acquisition and organic growth, we now have 5,500 apps spread across the business.

"So, separately from the contract, we are talking to Fujitsu about an application rationalisation exercise, which will bring the number of applications down to 1,500.

"Then, the support of the new server and desktop infrastructure provided by Fujitsu will drive more efficiency and enable us to get the number of applications [down] into the hundreds," he said.

The project will also involve the transfer of 67 Balfour Beatty employees to Fujitsu under the terms of the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations - better known as TUPE.

"We're 'TUPE-ing' 67 of our people to Fujitsu. We're already consulting on those individuals. For the first three months, they will continue to do what they are doing now, and for the following three months they will embed themselves into Fujitsu and still focus on the Balfour Beatty project," said Reeves.

CIO interview: How Balfour Beatty will rationalise servers and applications in £50m deal with Fujitsu

Construction giant hopes to slash number of servers in half and cut thousands of applications

Why Fujitsu?

An outsourcing project of this scope obviously took some time to plan.

As the construction company embarked on its shared services programme, it examined the market and compiled a list. About six months ago, it narrowed the list down to "the top players" - although Reeves declined to name the other providers that were looked at.

"It gave us the opportunity to look for a single-source provider and allowed us to look at a number of the top players and some more niche players in the end-user computing space.

"Fujitsu were preferred because they are among the top-three ICT organisations globally, so have the experience of doing what we needed them to do, and the capability to do that on a scale that we needed them to do it: it was a no-brainer," said Reeves.

Another reason for the selection of Fujitsu was its spend on research and development (R&D) and Balfour Beatty's need to be able to access the latest technology and technological know-how.

"Globally, they spend so much, and we can't match that. But by having them as a partner we can leverage that R&D in new technologies.

"Fujitsu operates in a lot of the same markets as us, so we had a lot in common there too. The other thing that we found was that culturally they were very similar to us in terms of their core values - when you put those together, Fujitsu was the clear choice," said Reeves.

In relation to the TUPE transfers of 67 Balfour Beatty employees, the CIO claimed that another reason that Fujitsu was selected was that it provided the best opportunity for the individuals' career development.

"Fujitsu have a really strong ethos of nurturing and bringing up talent, so we thought that was a great thing we could do for our 67 staff. So far, that has gone really well and the feedback from all our people is very good," he said.

The numbers

Reeves said that the £43m figure that has been touted as the exact contract value is incorrect, as the company intends to invest between £40m and £50m over the five-year contract on flexible terms.

"It is very much based on allowing our business to grow, so there isn't a fixed contract value or minimum commitment to spend.

"It is flexible and it offers both sides the opportunity to improve on things, we know it's not a contract that has been locked into a specific number," he said.

Reeves said the IT overhaul should deliver a £10m saving per year by 2015.