Barclays Inks Support Deal With Getronics

London-based Barclays Bank ($575 billion in assets) has signed a five-year, $240 million agreement with Getronics (Amsterdam) for desktop and application management support for more than 30,000 Barclays employees, most of whom are based in the United Kingdom. The deal covers three areas: workspace management, application services and technology transformation.

Workspace management includes client-site IT support; application services encompasses desktop provisioning and maintenance, access control, and call center support; and, finally, the technology transformation component includes "migrating [Barclays] to future versions of operating systems [and] service projects, moving them from one current technical state to a future one," relates Michael Kerr, VP, channel renewal, Getronics.

As an example, if Barclays were to deploy a new operating system such as Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) Vista, Getronics would manage the rollout. "We'd be positioned to migrate that across the desktop if and when they make such a decision," says Kerr. "Knowing that we have the capability to deploy this effectively across the whole population would be important, but the client would make the decision on such things."

Getronics replaces EDS (Plano, Texas), which previously provided IT support to the bank. "The first job is to rapidly take over the support services so there's no interruption of services to the client," says Kerr. "We have the teams deployed, we have the program and management office, we have the whole infrastructure, and we also have a good deal of experience in handling major global handovers such as this," he continues. "The key is a very strong program management office, with sets of tools, project plans and mutual agreement with the client," adds Kerr.

Getronics will serve Barclays primarily out of the U.K., but it also will draw upon its operations support center in Spain and a service center in Hungary. "Getronics has implemented, over the last number of years, a global network of support centers," notes Kerr. --Ivan Schneider

Clarification

In the article, "Eight Banks Join SAP In Development of Service-Oriented Architecture," which appeared in the February issue of BS&T, we did not accurately represent the scope of the Industry Value Network that SAP has lined up with leading global banks. Deployed on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), the network as envisioned would support services grouped around customer service (e.g., customer identity), operations (e.g., payment and lending), analytics (e.g., the evaluation of a cash flow) and support functions (e.g., HR).