Royal Mail blazes a trail to the future in cloud computing alliance with Capgemini

‘Pay-as-you-go’ solution chosen to support new ventures, transform services and cut costs. Royal Mail Group (RMG) has signed a six-year IT contract with Capgemini UK plc (Capgemini), a subsidiary of Capgemini Group, in a move which aims to transform its business and consumer online services, help to reduce its annual website IT costs and support expansion and diversification into a wide range of new web-based business opportunities without the delays and expense of traditional IT.

The contract is for cloud computing, a technology breakthrough which enables IT-on-demand to be piped into an organisation as a ‘smart utility’ on a money-saving pay-as-you-go basis. The new technology can be quickly and easily reconfigured to support RMG in launching new business ventures and bringing new services to market as quickly as possible. Areas seen as strong candidates for expansion and diversification at RMG include services for personal and small or medium business customers, and high-quality, innovative parcel delivery services to meet the needs of the UK’s boom in online shopping. The new technology will also empower RMG to keep pace with the emerging technologies and media being adopted by today’s consumers.

The key benefits of Capgemini’s solution for RMG are:

• enhanced flexibility and scalability, enabling specific services to expand or contract rapidly as levels of demand change
• the ability to integrate its products and services into third-party websites, for example, linking travel and leisure websites seamlessly to its foreign currency services
• the power to streamline and personalise many of its services, and capture and update customer profiles based on historic transactions
• the opportunity for smaller IT companies to link to the RMG ecosystem, encouraging innovation and competitiveness, based on open systems standards