Civica helps BT upgrade 6,000 desktops in latest stage of  the City of Edinburgh Council’s “Smart City” programme
BT has chosen Civica to provide software licensing services as part of its £10 million technology transformation programme for the City of Edinburgh Council. Civica is already delivering Workflow and Electronic Document Management (EDM) solutions for the council’s Revenues and Benefits processing, in an initiative which is on target to achieve £2 million in savings.

The two year technology transformation programme – called Service Redesign - is an innovative programme which will bring all council IT systems onto a centrally managed platform. Service Redesign forms part of the City of Edinburgh Council’s “Smart City” agenda which is putting new ICT technologies at the heart of transforming local services, and features initiatives such as a single ‘city portal’ gateway to services for residents. 

Service Redesign comprises a centralised service infrastructure based on Microsoft Active Directory and SMS with a managed desktop environment for 6,000 departmental users across all the council’s sites. The programme will also deliver a consolidated application service infrastructure which is based on VMWare and new e-mail services, using MS Exchange. 

Civica will deliver volume licensing agreements such as Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement in a deal worth £1.5 million. The company will deliver licensing advice and support departmental compliance to help Edinburgh and BT Global Services alike to reduce the cost of software ownership.  Civica has already delivered software for two of BT’s other major local government infrastructure projects.

Hayden Edwards, Service Redesign project manager, BT, said, "The Microsoft Enterprise agreement has proven to be an effective way for us to license this transformation. Civica is helping to bring about reduced software support costs on a large scale project. Too often, organisations neglect software licensing when they could actively manage it as we’re doing here.”

Steve Reynolds, managing director, Civica Services, said, “Civica has the proven track record and expertise to support infrastructure programmes of this type. We will be helping BT Global Services and the City of Edinburgh Council to simplify software management and compliance and help to drive costs out of the overall IT budget.”