FINANCE simplification equates to better customer service . The really big procurement story relates to RSA ’ s rationalisation of its global infrastructure and its data centre estate , and who better to explain that than Chief Procurement Officer Andrew Cameron .
“ We are moving to best of breed applications . A high proportion of our expense base was fixed . Our ability to take expense out of the operational base was limited by some of the agreements we had in place . At the beginning of the strategy work we went through a process of mapping our IT spend and comparing it to industry benchmarks , and infrastructure was one area that was a real outlier for us .”
The on-demand model 20 original bidders to take on RSA ’ s future infrastructure requirements were whittled down over ten months before finally a Global IT company Wipro was chosen to run RSA ’ s data centres , cloud , and end-user services , plus provide a multi-lingual service desk for the UK , Ireland and Scandinavia . CGI will be retained in Canada . At the same time the data centre estate has been cut to a single production location in each of the UK , Scandinavia and Ireland – Canada will continue to operate three , but then Canada is nearly six thousand miles across .
This reflects the increasing use of cloud capacity , a new model of provision , says Cameron . “ We are moving towards a model where we only pay for the capacity we use . One of our issues was our high fixed cost base . Now it is an ondemand model , so we are realising not only cost and flexibility benefits but also speeding up our ability to provide computing capacity for
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