AMP outsources to Computerland

AMP has appointed Computerland as its new outsourcing partner in a deal thought to be worth several million dollars, although none of the parties will discuss numbers. The three-year contract, with right of renewal, was signed last week.

The move to outsource everything other than desktops and the help desk has been partly driven by plans to move from the head office building in Wellington’s Customhouse Quay to the Hewlett-Packard building in Featherston Street before the end of the year.

AMP’s general manager professional services, Mark Ennis, says the insurer also had to decide whether to bring on more skills in-house or move to a hosted model, after refreshing its infrastructure around Citrix earlier this year.

“There were economic advantages [in outsourcing] around using a managed tool like Tivoli,” he says. “We were looking for an organisation that would mean we would be a significant size on their radar. That precluded some of the larger organisations.

“Computerland also had in-depth Citrix skills and some Tivoli.”

AMP was also familiar with Computerland, which in January was involved in its storage area network upgrade.

Only “a couple of staff” will be affected by the outsourcing arrangement, Ennis says. “We have been back-filling with contract staff rather than take on permanents.”

AMP is outsourcing 88 production and development servers, 92 applications and its 5.1TB storage network. Computerland will also manage the communications facilities.

The vendor has also been retained to help with the desktop shift to the HP building. There are around 400 PCs involved.

Ennis says AMP will subsequently be looking at a communications upgrade, though that depends on what it decides about customer relationship management. Decisions on both are expected some time next year.

AMP has 350,000 customers in New Zealand and is the country’s largest insurer.