Northern Ireland police brings IT under one roof

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has signed a contract with Fujitsu Services for the supply of managed IT services for the next eight years.

The contract could be worth up to £100m over its lifetime with an initial £34m agreement aiming to improve IT service quality and lower costs.

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The PSNI currently has five IT service providers for various elements of its IT but the Fujitsu deal will bring this under one company.

The PSNI's in-house IT staff will now be able to focus on more strategic projects as a result changes.

The contract will include a 24-hour support desk as well as the maintenance and servicing of more than 8,000 PCs and laptops crucial to day-to-day work of the police staff.

The various elements will be managed by around 100 Fujitsu Services staff and will also cover the fixed line telephony, wide area and local area networks, hosting and automatic number plate recognition camera technology.

John Tully, head of information and communications services at the PSNI said modern day policing is heavily dependent on IT so reliability is "paramount" and the service needs to be able to match the police force's ability to respond urgently.