Public Sector Roundup: Servers, e-buying cut costs

Stoke-on-Trent saves on order processing

Stoke-on-Trent City Council has halved the cost of processing orders by using EGS' e-procurement system, called the IDeA:marketplace. The council has already completed 4,200 transactions worth a total £1.4 million and expects to surpass £20 million in orders through the system by the end of 2007

Before the system was implemented, manually processing each purchase order cost the council £60. Now, orders cost between £16 and £26 - no small discount given the council makes 250,000 such purchases annually.

Sebastian Shaw, e-procurement officer the council, said: "We moved to an electronic e-procurement system as part of the overall e-Government agenda, but we also saw the huge potential it had for cost savings through both cashable and non-cashable systems, the improved management insight into purchasing and the ability to cut down on maverick buying."

Nottingham cuts energy use by 40 per cent with blade servers

Nottingham City Council has installed 43 Bull NovaScale B260 blade servers with EMC Clarion CX3 storage arrays to improve faster processing and better storage - as well as cutting 40 per cent of its overall energy consumption.

The new infrastructure will let the council build a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform, an electronic document management system, and a new email system.

Jas Padam, head of ICT infrastructure at the council, said: "As our services move online or are run through contact centres operating 24/7, we are pursuing higher application performance with reduced maintenance - basically, we want more for less. We have used the reduced maintenance inputs to refresh technology and alter the way we work by, for example, putting more people on customer service tasks. We are increasingly shaping our services around the customer."

Devon councils manage policies with Netconsent

Two Devon councils have chosen Netconsent to help them manage their policies. South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council both chose the solution from a shortlist provided by Devon Information Security Partnership, which evaluated software and negotiated lower prices for councils.

Robin Barlow, ICT support manager for South Hams said: "We needed a solution that would meet our criteria to effectively manage security policies, which has been very hard to achieve with current manual methods."

Dorset chooses heuristics for security

Dorset County Council has extended its agreement with ESET's NOD32, which will now protect 15,000 computers in local schools as well as the council's 4,500 machines.

Before switching to the NOD32 system, the council was hit by two virus attacks, which senior ICT officer Tony Beazer blamed on their signature-based anti-virus system.

"Heuristic capabilities were one of the features we looked at when choosing our anti-virus solution," he said. "The combination of new threats often being exploited before a vulnerability has even been announced and a large network to update even when we do know about a potential threat, means that reliable heuristic detection is an important aspect of securing the network."

"If NOD32 had been in place beforehand I believe that it would have been extremely unlikely that we would have suffered our two previous virus outbreaks," he added.

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