Anglian Water, one of the UK’s leading providers of water and wastewater services, has formed a strategic IT services alliance with Capgemini UK plc, part of Capgemini Group, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services with the signing of a five-year, multi-million pound outsourcing contract. This will cover the water company’s entire IT infrastructure as well as all its core business applications for the period 2011- 2015.

The focus of the contract will be on innovation and IT effectiveness to support the drive for excellence in all aspects of service delivery and business performance at Anglian Water, which is already consistently one of Britain’s top-performing water companies as rated by OFWAT, the UK industry water regulator. It is also one of the largest water companies in England and Wales, with over six million domestic and commercial customers across Eastern England and more than £2 billion investment in building and maintaining water and waste water networks over the last five years.

Chris Boucher, Director of Information Services at Anglian Water, said: ‘Effective IT is vital to everything we do, from planning, constructing and maintaining our water and waste network to serving and billing our customers. It is set to become even more important over the next five years in meeting our own ambitious business objectives, and in meeting or exceeding the expectations of our customers and the regulator. Capgemini clearly has the business and technical skills and experience, and the capacity for innovation, that can help drive our business forwards. We look forward to working with them on a long-term basis.’

Capgemini will deploy its Rightshore delivery model at Anglian Water, with IT infrastructure based at Capgemini data centres in Swindon and Bristol, applications management at Capgemini in the UK and India, and a dedicated IT help desk at a Capgemini facility in Romania. The transition from the incumbent IT supplier to Capgemini begins immediately and the new services are scheduled to go live in February 2011. Capgemini’s new ‘Merlin’ data centre in Swindon will be central to the contract. Capgemini will also offer consultancy and IT strategy on top of the IT implementation at the core of this project. The applications management part of the contract will deploy Capgemini’s Application Lifecycle Services global service line which helps ensure continuous alignment of applications with business needs.