OREANDA-NEWS. March 22, 2011. Finnish Lottery company Veikkaus and Fujitsu Services Oy have signed an ICT service agreement whereby Fujitsu, with its Patja operations model, will assume the responsibility of Veikkaus' office solutions and availability services. Also, nine IT specialists will transfer from Veikkaus to Fujitsu.

This Patja agreement covers the management of the servers and workstations for more than 400 users. The IT infrastructure servers will be located at Fujitsu's data centre and Veikkaus will from now on buy server capacity according to need. The agreement also covers product services, mobile services and Fujitsu Pushmail.

”Last year we conducted an internal analysis to determine which functions we should keep and for which outsourcing would be a more flexible and efficient option. We decided to outsource our IT infrastructure and focus on our core business, which is the production and development of game-related applications,” Chief Service Officer Erkki Mattila of Veikkaus.

According to him, this arrangement changes the company's functions in a profound way, as IT matters were previously primarily handled independently.

”For the users the most conspicuous change is the new help desk which they now must learn to call. The share of self-service will also be likely to increase. The servers will no longer be located at our own premises but at Fujitsu's data centre and we will be buying the server capacity we need. After all, our IT environment isn't any different from that of other companies, so standardised services work perfectly for us,” Mattila says.

With this agreement, Veikkaus seeks efficiency, flexibility and improved risk management.

”Information technology is vital for our operation, so in the long run we cannot afford to have IT availability depend on one or two people. We also hope that our new partner will have a lot of useful development proposals for our IT environment,” Mattila continues.

The criteria that tipped the decision in favour of Fujitsu were the process-like operation of a large ICT service company, detailed service descriptions and prominent reference customers. Moreover, the money game company had high information security requirements, the physical as well as logical criteria of which Fujitsu was able to meet.

”Fujitsu has mature processes that are based on best practices and that have been developed over a long period of time. We received a quality award ourselves last year, so we have a high regard for certificates and were convinced by Fujitsu's long-standing quality work,” Mattila points out.

The transition project of the Patja service is already underway and will be taken to production on July 1, 2011.