The Post Office is set to sign £500m in contracts that will finally end use of the controversial Horizon system and its supplier, Fujitsu. Accenture has won a £322.8m contract to take over from Fujitsu in running the Horizon IT system at the heart of the Post Office scandal.
US retail specialist One View Commerce has also won a £169.2m deal to replace Horizon and install new software across the Post Office’s branch network.
Accenture will transition ongoing support of Horizon away from its controversial provider since 1999 on a “walk in, take over” basis, finally ending Fujitsu’s involvement with the flawed system it developed.
The Post Office Horizon contract is believed to have been Fujitsu’s most lucrative ever contract in the UK, earning the Japanese-owned firm more than £2.5bn over its 25-plus years duration.
Nearly 1,000 subpostmasters were wrongly convicted after Horizon erroneously recorded accounting errors caused by bugs in the software, and a further 10,000 are eligible to claim compensation after the Post Office forced them to make good on phantom losses out of their own pockets.
“Accenture will work closely with Post Office and Fujitsu, transferring the knowledge, ways of working and key people to enable them to take over operation of the Horizon system,” said the Post Office, in a statement.
“In parallel, both Accenture and One View Commerce will be working together to build the replacement systems to deliver a modern solution that meets the needs of postmasters and our internal teams into the future. These contract awards are part of the wider five-year Post Office transformation plan which will deliver a digitally enabled, more sustainable business.”
Computer Weekly revealed earlier this month that Accenture was in the running for the Fujitsu replacement deal, with IBM also bidding. The five-year contract covers maintaining and supporting IT infrastructure within the datacentre; managing bespoke applications and integrations; stabilising the current Horizon system; and migrating services to the cloud.
One View Commerce will provide a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application hosted in the cloud, which the Post Office specified must use a modern microservice architecture. The software will provide point-of-sale capabilities and other functionality required for an end-to-end retail platform.
The move to standardised, off-the-shelf software represents a change in strategy for the Post Office, which throughout the Horizon era had insisted on using bespoke software designed for its own purposes.
The One View Commerce deal will run for a minimum of 10 years. The losing bidder was Escher Software, which provided middleware as part of the original version of Horizon, first rolled out in 1999. Both contracts are expected to be signed early next month.
“The priority is to maintain continuity and avoid disruption throughout the transition. Postmasters and partners will be kept informed throughout the process,” said the Post Office. “There are no immediate changes for branches, postmasters, partners or Post Office colleagues. Day-to-day operations remain the same. Fujitsu will continue to support the Horizon system during the transition until their formal exit date.”
In a recent interview with Computer Weekly, Post Office chief technology officer Paul Anastassi said Fujitsu will be out eight to 12 months after both contracts are signed. He added that by 2030, “we will have eradicated what we now know as Horizon completely from our estate. It won’t be there at all.”
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, when it revealed the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
