Metropolitan Police selects CSC for two tower contracts worth a combined £250m

CSC to provide hosting and end user services as Met Police ploughs ahead with SIAM tower model

The Metropolitan Police has selected CSC to provide its hosting and end user services in two contracts worth a combined total of almost £250m.

The London Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) awarded CSC one contract to deliver IT hosting services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in a six-year deal worth up to £95m.

In a separate contract to supply infrastructure end user services, CSC will be tasked with providing the Met Police with managed endpoints including desktops, thin clients, laptops and tablets, in addition to storage, print and office LAN support services. This contract runs for five years and is worth £155m.

CSC will be expected to work with Atos, which was awarded the Met Police's Service Integration and Management (SIAM) tower contract in November last year.

It may come as a surprise that the organisation has opted for the SIAM tower model, after a blog by Alex Holmes, deputy director of the Government Digital Service (GDS), suggested that the tower approach is no longer in line with government policy and is "not condoned".

While many other public sector bodies, such as the Ministry of Justice and Transport for London (TfL), are in the middle of a SIAM implementation and would therefore find it near impossible to change their strategies midway through, with a fresh contract the Met Police could have feasibly taken a different approach.

However, Computing has questioned the suggestion that the tower model is "no longer condoned" by government, as it had been working for the Tri-Borough council. Failures may be more to do with the implementation than the model itself. Just last week, TfL's CIO Steve Townsend suggested that some government departments were dressing up old outsourcing methods as the tower model - and that's why they are likely to fail. He declined to mention which public sector bodies he thought were doing this, however.

Either way, it isn't the first time the Met Police has decided to go against what is expected by government and IT suppliers. It is outsourcing its human resources, payroll and finance functions to Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL) in a 10-year deal. This goes against what many in government have been advocating in recent years: namely, short, flexible contracts that minimise vendor lock-in.