Fujitsu lastly thrown out of Put up Workplace in £500m Horizon alternative offers

The Put up Workplace is about to signal £500m in contracts that may lastly finish use of the controversial Horizon system and its provider, Fujitsu. Accenture has gained a £322.8m contract to take over from Fujitsu in operating the Horizon IT system on the coronary heart of the Put up Workplace scandal.

US retail specialist One View Commerce has additionally gained a £169.2m deal to exchange Horizon and set up new software program throughout the Put up Workplace’s department community.

Accenture will transition ongoing help of Horizon away from its controversial supplier since 1999 on a “stroll in, take over” foundation, lastly ending Fujitsu’s involvement with the flawed system it developed.

The Put up Workplace Horizon contract is believed to have been Fujitsu’s most profitable ever contract within the UK, incomes the Japanese-owned agency greater than £2.5bn over its 25-plus years period.

Almost 1,000 subpostmasters have been wrongly convicted after Horizon erroneously recorded accounting errors attributable to bugs within the software program, and an additional 10,000 are eligible to assert compensation after the Put up Workplace compelled them to make good on phantom losses out of their very own pockets.

“Accenture will work intently with Put up Workplace and Fujitsu, transferring the information, methods of working and key individuals to allow them to take over operation of the Horizon system,” stated the Put up Workplace, in a press release.

“In parallel, each Accenture and One View Commerce might be working collectively to construct the alternative techniques to ship a contemporary resolution that meets the wants of postmasters and our inside groups into the longer term. These contract awards are a part of the broader five-year Put up Workplace transformation plan which is able to ship a digitally enabled, extra sustainable enterprise.”

Pc Weekly revealed earlier this month that Accenture was within the operating for the Fujitsu alternative deal, with IBM additionally bidding. The five-year contract covers sustaining and supporting IT infrastructure throughout the datacentre; managing bespoke purposes and integrations; stabilising the present Horizon system; and migrating companies to the cloud.

One View Commerce will present a software-as-a-service (SaaS) software hosted within the cloud, which the Put up Workplace specified should use a contemporary microservice structure. The software program will present point-of-sale capabilities and different performance required for an end-to-end retail platform.

The transfer to standardised, off-the-shelf software program represents a change in technique for the Put up Workplace, which all through the Horizon period had insisted on utilizing bespoke software program designed for its personal functions.

The One View Commerce deal will run for at least 10 years. The dropping bidder was Escher Software program, which supplied middleware as a part of the unique model of Horizon, first rolled out in 1999. Each contracts are anticipated to be signed early subsequent month.

“The precedence is to keep up continuity and keep away from disruption all through the transition. Postmasters and companions might be stored knowledgeable all through the method,” stated the Put up Workplace. “There aren’t any fast adjustments for branches, postmasters, companions or Put up Workplace colleagues. Day-to-day operations stay the identical. Fujitsu will proceed to help the Horizon system in the course of the transition till their formal exit date.”

In a latest interview with Pc Weekly, Put up Workplace chief know-how officer Paul Anastassi stated Fujitsu might be out eight to 12 months after each contracts are signed. He added that by 2030, “we can have eradicated what we now know as Horizon utterly from our property. It gained’t be there in any respect.”

The Put up Workplace scandal was first uncovered by Pc Weekly in 2009, when it revealed the tales of seven subpostmasters and the issues they suffered as a result of Horizon, which led to essentially the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British historical past (see beneath timeline of Pc Weekly articles in regards to the scandal since 2009).