?Bauer Media inks tech support deal with Capgemini

Bauer Media has offloaded the management of four core IT infrastructure services to Capgemini, under a new five-year deal.

Under the agreement, Capgemini is providing data centre facilities management, centralised computing, end user and helpdesk services to support around 2,000 staff in Australia and New Zealand. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.

The media company also expects to sign a refreshed outsourcing agreement with another provider to manage its network infrastructure in the coming week.

The agreement has moved Bauer Media from a capex to an opex consumption model where technology services are paid for as they are needed.

Stephen Haddad, director of technology, at Bauer Media, said the profile of Bauer Media’s business is changing and a move to this type of structure was the first stepping stone to be ready for that change.

For instance, the organisation no longer needs to spend money upfront to purchase disk storage, said Haddad.

“Previously, we would acquire all our disk up front and consume it over a period of time,” he said. “We would need to make a capital purchase of physical hardware and house that disk array or a storage facility – we would buy 100 per cent and consume 10 per cent in the first year and consume away, but we have made the initial capital outlay up front.

“In this model, we are purchasing based on ‘resource units’, so as you use, you pay. What we are purchasing is not only the physical infrastructure but the infrastructure braced by a set of services.”

This is expected to improve the quality of the company’s IT operating environment, he said.

Haddad added that an opex model such as this is cheaper over the long term but what’s more important is having ‘additional levers’ available to move cost without it affecting the level of service provided to end users.

Capgemini provides a range of skills that Bauer Media doesn’t have in-house, said Haddad.

“For example, we are traditionally a Wintel site; let’s assume that we want to take on some Linux capability. There would be only two options – we would either have to … reskill existing resources or find a third party that had that skill set.

“Those skill sets are already inherent in their [Capgemini’s] operating business. They have them at varying levels – they have support models and operating models for this environment,” he said.