Civica has been awarded a £10.8m contract by Lambeth Council for ICT managed services for schools in the Lambeth Learning Futures organization. The contract is for eight years.

Services to be provided include:

• Transferring services from the incumbent provider
• Hosting core ICT services in Civica’s cloud
• Implementing a virtual desktop infrastructure at each school
• Helpdesk services to support ~10k users
• Broadband technical support, including assistance with filtering, security and email
• e-safety and data protection advice
• Support and training for schools, and advice on ICT integration for new building projects
• Full integration with the London Grid for Learning.

The incumbent IT team will transfer to Civica.

Cost savings are to be achieved through cloud deployment and utility pricing charged on top of the core managed service package. Civica is to buy back legacy devices from the schools and support them in making older devices last longer. Lambeth will continue to run an aggregated procurement model allowing schools to buy more services on-demand.

Civica provides similar services to local authority schools in Sheffield and Barnsley, to ~60,000 users in total.

This award was first announced on December 12, 2013. Civica has now started to deliver the services, replacing RM Education, the incumbent supplier.

Civica is the supplier to watch in U.K. local government:

• It is expanding its revenue and benefits services with two shared services schemes
• In ICT, it has won contracts from incumbents elsewhere too, e.g. an ICT managed services contract in 2012 at St. Anne’s Academy in Rochdale, where it replaced Capita (BSF) Managed Service
• At Lambeth, where Capita has a long established relationship with the Council for revenue and benefits services, it is Civica that has won the Lambeth Learning Futures ICT contract
• Civica is adept at cross-selling to existing clients too. For example at Rochdale, it also provides the library management system. Given its broad portfolio of software and services, every new relationship offers Civica many cross-selling opportunities.