Royal Mail turns to Capgemini to integrate the cloud

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.information-age.com/channels ... loud.thtml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Six-year deal sees IT outsourcer act as ‘services integrator’ for third-party cloud providers

UK postal operator Royal Mail has signed a six-year contract with Capgemini under which the IT outsourcer will act as a ‘services integrator’ for third party cloud computing offerings.

Capgemini will deliver any new functionality or services that Royal Mail wishes to add to its website by provisioning, integrating and managing cloud-based services from ‘pre-vetted’ suppliers such as Salesforce.com and Google.

Royal Mail will pay for this service, entitled Capgemini Immediate, partially on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In an interview with Information Age earlier this year, Royal Mail’s chief technology architect Stuart Curley lamented that the inflexibility of the organisation’s legacy systems – designed for an era when it enjoyed a monopoly on all postal deliveries – prevented it from adding new products and services. “IT is potentially becoming a serious barrier to that business transformation,” he said.

Curley said at the time that he saw cloud computing as the solution to this inflexibility, but added that he would rather deal with a single IT services provider than a number of individual cloud suppliers.

“I don’t want to buy cloud services directly from Amazon Web Services, and I don’t want to go to a systems integrator, who will build a custom system and host it in a traditional data centre,” he said. “I want to go to a ‘services integrator’ who will provide me with a given set of services and with a given service level agreement associated with it. I don’t care, at the end of the day, where the underlying infrastructure is.

[Biker Mouse]

http://www.information-age.com/channels ... loud.thtml

Six-year deal sees IT outsourcer act as ‘services integrator’ for third-party cloud providers

UK postal operator Royal Mail has signed a six-year contract with Capgemini under which the IT outsourcer will act as a ‘services integrator’ for third party cloud computing offerings.

Capgemini will deliver any new functionality or services that Royal Mail wishes to add to its website by provisioning, integrating and managing cloud-based services from ‘pre-vetted’ suppliers such as Salesforce.com and Google.

Royal Mail will pay for this service, entitled Capgemini Immediate, partially on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In an interview with Information Age earlier this year, Royal Mail’s chief technology architect Stuart Curley lamented that the inflexibility of the organisation’s legacy systems – designed for an era when it enjoyed a monopoly on all postal deliveries – prevented it from adding new products and services. “IT is potentially becoming a serious barrier to that business transformation,” he said.

Curley said at the time that he saw cloud computing as the solution to this inflexibility, but added that he would rather deal with a single IT services provider than a number of individual cloud suppliers.

“I don’t want to buy cloud services directly from Amazon Web Services, and I don’t want to go to a systems integrator, who will build a custom system and host it in a traditional data centre,” he said. “I want to go to a ‘services integrator’ who will provide me with a given set of services and with a given service level agreement associated with it. I don’t care, at the end of the day, where the underlying infrastructure is.

This one's lost on me!

[fishtank]

This one's lost on me!

It's IT mate...they make words up to stop us idiots from getting involved and exposing it all as a sham.
"What does this system do"...."you wouldn't understand"...."that'll be feck all then"

[TrueBlueTerrier]

In its easiest form "Cloud Computing" is all the Intranet systems that are used within the Group. My reading of this is that the old (legacy in the article) system is starting to creak under the strain, some of it caused because of the policy of using 6 outside firms to write for it. This meant that most of the programs were bolt ons rather than inbuilt which make the system unstable and unwieldy.

I guess they are bringing in this company to integrate the system and make it more stable and hopefully more flexible.

[Straight4ward]

fishtank wrote;
It's IT mate...they make words up to stop us idiots from getting involved and exposing it all as a sham.
"What does this system do"...."you wouldn't understand"...."that'll be feck all then"

Succinctly put, as ever.

It is complete bollocks for which we will pay extortionate sums of money and end up with absolutely nothing. A fine example of how the market system works.