UK Ministry of Justice gets multimillion dollar purchasing system to deliver savings

The United Kingdom Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has agreed a five-year, AUD$21.8 million deal to purchase hosted operations and services including purchasing systems.

Under the terms of the agreement Savvis will provide the MoJ with access to its Government Wide Service (GWS), a cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform recently made available to all government departments and third-party suppliers in the U.K.

The platform supports the MoJ's shared services programme, which it is hoped will deliver annual savings of $43m per year by 2014.

The MoJ will use the platform for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which is being designed by Steria and implemented by Accenture.

The ERP system will deliver transactional and professional services to more than 80,000 users as part of MoJ's Common Operating Model for human resources, finance, purchase and payroll systems. It is scheduled to be fully operational by spring 2013.

"By selecting Savvis' GWS, the Ministry of Justice gains instant access to secure infrastructure and obtains the interdepartmental connectivity required for the ERP system," said Neil Cresswell, managing director, EMEA, at Savvis.

"The platform also eliminates the extensive and costly design, construction and testing process typically associated with infrastructure required for this type of project," he said.

The deal means that MoJ joins the UK Home Office in using the GWS for delivering centralised applications.

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