CSC wins £80m Bhs extension

Retail giant British Home Stores (Bhs) is spending £80m to extend its IT outsourcing contract with services firm CSC for another seven years.

Under the new deal, CSC will continue to maintain 850 desktops and 68 servers, as well as 2,500 electronic point of sale (Epos) terminals and infrastructure servers across 165 UK stores.

A spokeswoman for Bhs said that after a successful review of its operations, outsourcing IT services to "best-practice" suppliers was a way it could continue to offer "significant business benefits".

CSC is currently updating software on Bhs's desktops as part of the new deal.

"We operate an ongoing refreshment cycle with Bhs," said Ivor Canavan, vice president of commercial customers at CSC.

"We are taking out NT and going over to XP."

About 100 CSC employees, including business analysts and call centre staff, will provide application and infrastructure support and maintenance as part of the contract, which CSC estimates will be worth an additional £80m.

CSC began providing IT services to Bhs in 1993 and since then has migrated Epos systems across to IBM and installed Unix, IBM and HP servers.

The IT firm has also installed Retek merchandising and data analysis systems, allowing the retailer to analyse sales and customer information and store it in CSC's hosted data warehouse.

"The hosted data warehouse provides analysis of store sales, categories and individual product lines," said Canavan.

Bhs franchises across Europe and the Middle East will not be serviced as part of the contract, but CSC said it was providing certain services and systems to some of the franchise stores under separate arrangements.