HBOS inks £35m hardware support deal

High street bank HBOS has signed a £35m hardware and services deal with StorageTek that will see the vendor providing maintenance and support for the bank's data centres.

As part of the three-year deal StorageTek will be responsible for providing tape storage products and 'break/fix' maintenance and support across the various hardware platforms in HBOS' two UK data centres.

The move follows the consolidation from seven data centres to two after the merger between Halifax and the Bank of Scotland in 2001 and the creation of a single IT group for the bank in 2003.

John Callan, head of IT services delivery at HBOS, told silicon.com the bank previously had point-to-point service contracts with each of the individual hardware suppliers, which include HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, StorageTek and Sun.

"It gives us a single point of contact in terms of hardware maintenance and a more flexible and responsive service. We now have more engineers on the ground and a proactive monitoring service," said Callan.

He declined to reveal the exact cost savings targeted from the deal but said that alone was not the main driver.

"The key benefits for this deal commercially are significant but it is not driven 100 per cent on a commercial basis. The key thing for me is looking to mitigate risk," he said.

The contract is part of HBOS' wider technology strategy to simplify and consolidate its IT infrastructure and Callan said the next move will be to look at the actual hardware platforms themselves.

"Having done the data centre consolidation one of the key things we are looking at in parallel and particularly focusing on in 2005 is a programme of consolidation in the data centre both in mainframe and mid-range hardware," he said.