Highways Agency awards managed service contract for command, control and communications services to Computacenter

Command, control and communications services supporting the country’s new traffic officers are to be managed by IT services company Computacenter, under a five-year deal with the Highways Agency.

Under the managed service contract, which is worth more than £8 million, Computacenter will deliver a range of IT services in partnership with information and communications technology specialist Vivista to support the IT infrastructure at the agency’s new Regional Control Centres.

The seven centres are a core part of a new Highways Agency service for England’s motorways, which is expected to reduce congestion by 5% in the next five years.

Ian Chalmers, Highway’s Agency Technology Team Leader for the Regional Control Centres, commented: “Staff at the centres will be responsible for a number of services that will help to manage incidents and keep traffic moving on the country’s 4,800 miles of motorway. As a result the systems they use need to be continuously available and highly resilient.”

More than 300 control centre staff will eventually use the system, which will enable them to dispatch traffic officers to incidents.

The command and control centre infrastructure is based on a clustered Sun Microsystems and HP server backend, which was configured by Computacenter to ensure maximum resilience. HP desktops are also being used by the control centre staff, along with bespoke command and communications solutions from Vivista. Meanwhile the 1,000 traffic officers will be equipped with Sepura Airwave radio terminals.

All these technologies will be supported under the managed service, which will go live in Spring 2005 along with the first regional control centre in the West Midlands. “By partnering with experienced IT service providers, we are able to reduce the risks and costs associated with managing the new system,” commented Chalmers. “Computacenter and Vivista both have extensive experience of the new technology we are implementing, and the managed service will enable us to access a flexible pool of resources as required.”

The Highways Agency developed the centres in response to legislation passed last year, which gives the organisation and its newly created traffic officers responsibility for managing traffic on England’s motorways. The legislation followed a review with the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2003. The police will jointly staff the new regional control centres, which may also become responsible for managing the country’s trunk roads in the future.

Alan Back, Computacenter’s Government Sector Director, commented: “The command and control infrastructure supporting the regional control centres will be critical to the traffic flow on England’s motorways. To ensure the agency’s systems are constantly operational, it is essential that the managed service is not only highly responsive but also flexible. By working with Vivista, we are able to provide the Highways Agency with a reliable, end-to-end service across the entire command and control infrastructure.”

The managed service includes asset management, configuration management, logistics, and third party supplier management, and was awarded to Computacenter and Vivista following a competitive tender using the Government’s Telecommunications Catalogue (GTC).