At the weekend the Sunday Times published a few lines in its ‘Digest’ with the headline “Lockheed Martin gets ‘preferred bidder’ on £125 million MoJ IT System”. The details were scant but on further investigation it appears that Lockheed has beaten IBM at the final hurdle to the prize of ‘Service Integration & Management’ (SIAM) contract for the Ministry of Justice (MoJ)’s FITS (Future IT Services) programme.
The SIAM services contract, to run over five years, involves supplier managing the transition of existing services to a new ‘tower’ model and co-ordinating the service delivery from the other ‘Tower’ suppliers (including the End User Computing tower). We understand that Lockheed’s bid involves partners Atos (for service desk provision), CadencePartnership (a change management consultancy) and Skyscape Cloud Services (for the provision of its secure cloud infrastructure). The contract – at the top end of the initial estimates (see tender) - breaches the Cabinet Office ‘rule’ of ‘no IT contracts to be let over £100 million'. But it is clear that the spoils are being spread amongst partners.
Lockheed Martin UK has been crucial to Lockheed’s ambitions to grow its international business to some 20% of revenues by drawing on its US experiences. And winning further business in the civil sector (i.e. outside of defence) through the Information Systems & Global Services (IS&GS) business unit has been central to that (see UK defence SITS supplier landscape).
In 2012, we estimate that Lockheed generated about £255 million of SITS revenues from the UK market (see UK SITS Rankings 2013). This latest win – one of its largest IT wins to date - will give a significant boost to Lockheed’s UK IT business. Lockheed’s success comes after another major UK defence contractor – BAE Systems (Detica) won the SIAM contract at FCO. What’s clear is that partnerships with traditional IT companies will remain an important part of Lockheed’s approach. And it is interesting that despite investing in its own Cloud Solution as a Service (SolaS – listed on the G-Cloud framework), it has chosen, on this occasion, to partner with SME hosting provider, Skyscape.