OREANDA-NEWS. September 7, 2011. Home credit provider International Personal Finance (IPF), has tasked Fujitsu with transforming its IT environment to provide greater business agility. The private cloud-based IaaS architecture will reduce the total cost of IPF’s IT infrastructure and deliver a more flexible solution that can meet the needs of the company as it realises its plans for expansion into new markets.

Under the terms of the Ј10 million contract, IPF’s applications and data will be hosted by Fujitsu, with servers and storage provided on a pay-per-use model. A 12 month transition programme is currently under way and will see Fujitsu move business critical applications such as Data Platform and FOCUS to its Southern data centres. Fujitsu emerged as the leader in a tender and benchmarking process, which included submissions from several suppliers, to secure this project.

The deal builds on an existing relationship with Fujitsu, which has supported its IT environment for nine years through data centre services. Notably, Fujitsu provided support to 150 staff in Leeds when IPF demerged from Provident in 2007.

“IPF is a truly international company with ambitious growth plans,” said Andrew Herd, head of IT commercial & service, IPF. “Our intention is to continue to enter new markets and as such it is important that we can dynamically grow our estate without constraint. With the environment created by Fujitsu we will have the ability to increase and decrease our resources quickly, which better suits our business requirements. The next few months are crucial, as we build new infrastructure and migrate our services. However, we are confident that Fujitsu will manage this process efficiently and smoothly, with minimum disruption to services.”

Fujitsu will provide a robust architectural environment, which has been fully risk-tested, to ensure that services run at an equivalent service level throughout the migration period.

Stephen Long, business unit director, private sector division at Fujitsu UK & Ireland said, “As with any financial services institution, IPF deals on a day to day basis with highly sensitive, mission critical data. With this offering we are able to provide a trusted environment, to the highest security classifications – at the same time as meeting IPF’s demands for technologies that support true business agility.”