The Bank of England has brought in a range of new IT partners in a £60 million drive to improve its “consumption based spend and reporting”, as well as to make more “strategic TCO decisions on location of workloads.”
The Central Bank, known as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, has contracted support as it eyes “new approaches to Technical Debt” and looks to overhaul its SAP environment, a contract notice revealed.
The latter includes use of SAP’s “Business Warehouse” (a data warehouse product based on NetWeaver ABAP) – the Bank “retains a highly configured estate with complex and high value logistics” it added.
The tone of the contract notice suggests a serious effort to shake up its relationships with existing providers and how they service the bank. It comes after the bank churned through CIO; it now appears to have stabilised IT leadership.
See also: Bank of England anoints its fourth CIO in just two years as IT leadership churn continues
It sought service providers with expertise across “ERP solutions, M365 and D365” and noted that it is “seeking to understand where the supply chain can take a more outcome-based approach to service provision…”
Also wanted?
Suppliers that can deliver services covering multi cloud environments and the interoperability between them and to on premise and shared data centres. Suppliers would also need to have an understanding about consumption models, reserved instances, cloud license management and FinOps. The Bank has a variety of data centres and cloud service providers and will seek to review this over time. It is keen to improve consumption based spend and reporting and to be able to make strategic TCO decisions on location of workloads.
The Bank of England appointed 15 companies to a technology support services framework earlier this year, it said in a contract notice on September 5. The series of “zero commit” agreements will be in place for next four years, with a maximum agreed BoE spend of £60 million.
The aim: “support the… technology infrastructure and systems the Bank has in place” via offtake agreements across nine separate lots.
Those brought in: Accenture, Axiologik, Civica, Coforge, Cognizant, Conexia, Credera, EPI-USE Labs, Infosys, ITC Infotech, Mastek, QA Ltd, Telstra, Ten10 Solutions, and Version 1, the contract notice shows.
The contract’s nine lots were expansive – with potential help contracted across everything from the software and services highlighted above to telecommunications strategy. Ultimately, one sentence in the contract notice captured the scale of the ambition: Help was wanted, the BoE said, from suppliers “comfortable operating Large Change, transformation or managed services solutions across the Technology stack.”
