Marks and Spencer inks £19 million IT deal

Marks and Spencer (M&S) has signed a five-year, 19-million IT managed services contract that will help support the retailer's strategic business objectives and growth with year-on-year environmental and cost savings.

This deal will target more than 4,000 head office users across six UK sites with better access to core technology, tools and processes.

Damone Quigley, head of Infrastructure and application services at Marks and Spencer said: "The partnership will enable us to align IT more closely to the business and deliver tangible results at lower and predictable costs."

It will also support M&S' five-year, 100-point 'Plan A' initiative with environmentally friendly hardware configurations and recycling regulation, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive-compliant asset disposal process with zero per cent of IT going to landfill.

The deal expands a previous agreement with Computacenter Services and will be made up of 10 new service streams, which include release management, build management, software asset management and security administration.

Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.