JANET, the organisation that operates shared network services for the UK’s higher education sector, has announced the suppliers that will provide cloud infrastructure services to its customers over the next four years.
Dell, HP Enterprise Services, Eduserv, Fujitsu, Liberata, Logicalis, Verizon and Capita will all participate in the four-year framework agreement, which could be worth up to £50 million, JANET said in its contract award notice published today.
The framework will allow JANET’s members to procure IT infrastructure services on a pay-as-you-go basis. It includes provision of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings, as well virtualisation and data centre collocation services.
JANET called the framework “wide-ranging, offering colocation through to cloud infrastructure services, which is available to everyone with a JANET network connection”. Suppliers will pay JANET 2% of the total value of goods and services procured through the framework.
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“We’ve managed to establish a framework, which is agile enough for everyone on the Janet network, in a remarkably short space of time. Institutions are queuing up to use it, with our support, to help them move to cloud computing and data centres,” Dan Perry, head of strategic business at JANET said.
For Dell, inclusion on the framework is a small affirmation of its recently emphasised focus on services rather than PCs. “We’re not really a PC company anymore. We’re an end-to-end IT solutions company,” said CEO Michael Dell at an event in San Francisco at the end of February.
