Post Office: Here's £100m, Computacenter. Now get us up to date, for pity's sake

Services-based reseller Computacenter has bagged a £100m project to refresh and manage tens of thousands of PCs for the Post Office, in line with the customer’s aim to drag itself into the 21st century. The four-year End User Computing Tower involves CC buying, configuring, installing and maintaining more than 30,000 devices …

[Anonymous Coward]

POP!!!!!

That's the sound of a company, who says it's srapped for cash, pulling £100 million quid out of its arse!!

Mind you they'll be able to claw it back over the next few weeks by slicing open the Christmas cards and nicking the cash ment for our younger relations....fa la la la laa la la la laa.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: POP!!!!!

"Mind you they'll be able to claw it back over the next few weeks by slicing open the Christmas cards and nicking the cash ment for our younger relations"

Naaahh. That's the staff that do that. The Post Office claw it back legally, by charging almost eleven fucking shillings to maybe deliver a letter two or three days later.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: POP!!!!!

"That's the staff that do that. The Post Office claw it back legally, by charging almost eleven fucking shillings to maybe deliver a letter two or three days later"

That's the Royal Mail. Post Office are the just the guys who take the money for them, and sell you car insurance and other non-postal stuff.

Actually as a business, we collect our post from sorting office, and frank stuff that goes out. So whatever happens with the Post Office IT shouldn't affect me anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Relatively highly.."

>> John Beard, director of the financial services and retail sector at Computacenter ... claimed his firm’s “credibility and references” meant it scored “relatively highly” against rivals [HP and Fujtsu].

Even if it is the shit sandwich on the platter with the least amount of shit in it ... it's still a shit sandwich.

[Lusty]

Tier 4

For the post office? What. the. F*%k. have the post office got on computers that needs a tier 4? Is it the secret location of all my lost mail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tier 4

11000 branches worth of accounts. Lots of cash flows through the Post Office network. Lots of post office staff have fallen foul of the Horizon system. It's about time it was replaced by something that works...

[Anonymous Coward]

"it spent two years bidding for the business"

Good heavens.

[Dominion]

And still people wonder why SMEs can't get a slice of the pie...

[vee Hybrid]

Crash

Oh dear Office 365!

Bring back snail mail

[P. Lee]

100m

How much is that per post-office?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 100m

Around £8696 - there are 11500 branches according to Wikipedia and the article.

That's £2174 per year per branch on average.

Looking from a per machine perspective it's £3333 or £833 per year per machine.

Lucky for Computacenter they will have written the contract in such a specific way they will be able to charge massively for anything not explicitly included, and it'll be the fault of the post office when they didn't ask for keyboards which turn out to be £200 a pop from their exclusive supplier. This is how all public outsourcing and purchasing works unfortunately, but Computacenter have 2 years of sales process to pay for and the value of the contract won't cover that or the realistic supply of all that kit and services for 4 years, not to mention payback for having jumped through spending framework hoops and created various proposals. Of course, in three years the Post Office will claim that the contract has cost way more than expected and demand change at which point the tender will start and someone else will get to play the game for a while.

Cynical? me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 100m

Oh my you are so thick it makes me cry... how many machines(counters) per branch, some post offices for example inner city ones, have 20x counters, even if not staffed to open them.. how much does it cost to send an engineer to the mids of nowhere to replace a counter ie. its not the same as a single head office site.

Geez....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 100m

That's what the word average was in there for dumbass!

The total number of machines was in the article so the cost per supplied machine is known regardless of how many each site has. At this scale we don't take into account where the machines are, it's an average cost per desktop based on an average engineer effort to install and configure it. The far ones are offset by the many London/Birmingham/etc based ones right next door to an engineer.

[keithpeter]

Re: 100m

"...they didn't ask for keyboards which turn out to be £200 a pop from their exclusive supplier."

Does that happen in the commercial sector as well?

If so, it might explain why the young man in the shoe shop who sold me some boots today typed the trivial transaction on a lovely mechanical switch keyboard on his PC based POS terminal. Well solid clack. Sounded like Cherry blue. I reckon the keyboard was worth more than the pokey little monitor he had.

[John Smith 19]

The post office has a shed load of hardware in the back end.

Like a number of large orgs they used (and probably still do) use a lot of mainframe to support their very large estate.

There's a lot of hardware stashed around the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

The machines currently behind post office counters are Fujitsu Pentium 4s with 256Mb of memory running NT4 service pack 6 with a 10" touch screen...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which works fine, or? I spoke with my local post office master and he found it did the job. Does it need to convert blu-ray to mkv files in the background, or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which works fine? No. It's 15 years old. It's slow. It's unreliable. There are no spares apart from those that are cannibalised from other machines. It's full of errors which the PO, after years of denial, is beginning to admit.

I know of a village post office that was closed down because the Postmistress was accused of fraud. They opened up a temporary post office in the village hall and employed the dismissed Postmistress to run it because no-one else would.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240207934/End-in-sight-for-sub-postmaster-claims-against-Post-Offices-Horizon-accounting-system

[Sheep!]

ATOS? Really? The company that single-handedly tried to destroy the lives of those people claiming sickness benefit will now be involved in the business that deals with paying them? What a kick in the nuts for sick people that is.

See icon.