New Signature wins Met Police deal in 'one of the largest G-Cloud procurements to date'
Cloud service provider inks two-year deal as part of police force's digital strategy
New Signature has signed a two-year deal with the Metropolitan Police to support its move into the public cloud.
The contract was awarded through the G-Cloud framework and is part of the Met's three-year digital policing strategy, which seeks to modernise technology for users in the force and improve the general public's digital access to the police. New Signature said the deal is "one of the largest" G-Cloud procurements to date, but did not disclose the value.
Dan Scarfe, founder of Microsoft partner New Signature, told CRN that the deal was a watershed moment for the public body, both in terms of moving their digital work to the cloud and in moving away from their traditional global system integrator (GSI) partners.
"They've been outsourced to the big GSIs for forever, but this time around they wanted to do something different and work with a smaller, boutique cloud provider and decided to go with us," he said.
Scarfe claimed that the Met's move to the public cloud comes from a desire to address the lack of speed and agility it experienced using traditional datacentres and GSIs.
"I think they were looking for an organisation that was a specialist in this area, rather than the big GSIs that don't necessarily have quite the level of experience that we have we with pure-play environments," he said.
"They were looking for a company that could be more nimble and more closely aligned with their new digital policing strategy, which is all around innovation, agility and doing things differently."
Scarfe also said that the deal is transformational for New Signature, opening up a range of new markets and customers for the cloud service provider.
"We've had to build a brand new secure network operations centre to support this environment and now that we have that available we can sell public cloud to a range of new organisations that wouldn't perhaps have been comfortable using it before," he explained.
"It's yet more validation that companies such as ours will thrive in this new world because we can deliver the agility and speed that these traditional organisations are now clamouring for and demanding."
Angus McCallum, CIO for the Metropolitan Police, said: "We are very pleased to have selected New Signature to help us as we start to develop and implement our 'Cloud-First Strategy' transition.
"The Met is committed to ensuring all our people have the right technology to do their jobs with excellence and New Signature's involvement is a critical part of building our capability and achieving fast results."