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Summer 1999
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Swale Borough Council has opted for a networked SCO/Pick D³ combination as the platform of choice for its recent IT systems upgrade.
The contract, worth £350,000, allows for the installation of the fully integrated network and servers and ongoing support of the network and hardware by Pick value added reseller, Sanderson Brookstreet.
The new system, based at the council’s Sittingbourne Head Office, will be used by almost 300 users at three sites and will support all of the authority’s applications, including council tax, benefits and financial systems. Installation was completed in October 1996 and the migration of the systems currently residing on the Council’s MDIS Reality system, most of which have been written in-house, has now also been completed.
Swale’s decision to upgrade its IT systems was largely driven by the increasing complexities of local government administration and the resulting impact on IT usage. Forthcoming CCT meant that managers needed to be more in control of their IT costs which was not possible on the existing MDIS platform. In addition, the growing reliance on PCs throughout the council was changing working practices, necessitating corresponding changes in IT systems. Swale therefore decided to undertake a complete IT overhaul - in particular of its data management capabilities - to ensure that its IT systems would be fully compliant with emerging global technical standards well into the next decade, without being tied to a single hardware supplier.
The contract for Swale’s IT upgrade was put out for competitive tender. Swale chose the SCO/D³ combination as it offered optimum performance and network functionality in an easy-to-use package, at a competitive price. Sanderson Brookstreet is supplying a 600 point 100 M/Bit network and nine servers as the council’s central computing resource, of which five are running D³ and SCO, one running UniVerse (for two third party applications) and three running Windows NT, for PC based systems. This has been designed to appear to users as a single logical computer, minimising disruption to current working practices.
Dave Thomas, Swale Borough Council’s IT manager, commented: “It’s very important for us to ensure that our IT systems are optimised to support all areas of the council’s activities - and our existing technology was increasingly causing us problems as the number of users, and their demands, grew. We decided that an upgrade to open systems technology was absolutely vital to enable us to continue to effectively support our administration.”
He continued: “The SCO/D³ combination has given us an extremely flexible system which we are confident will meet our users needs well into the next decade, whilst protecting our considerable investment in in-house Pick-based systems, and the proven expertise of our own IT staff. We are delighted with the system’s performance so far - we’re already experiencing significant improvements in performance. Most importantly, for a public authority, it has proved a very cost-effective solution, providing our end users with the increased functionality that they have requested, at a reduced cost too. All in all, we are delighted with the system.”
Sanderson BrookstreetLast Updated: 30 June 1999