Fujitsu will be completely removed from its Post Office contract by the summer of 2027, and its Horizon system will be “eradicated” earlier than planned for.
According to Post Office chief technology officer (CTO) Paul Anastassi, who heads up the replacement project, two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers by the summer of this year.
The Lot 1 contract will see a supplier take over the existing Horizon services in a £323 deal. It will include application support for subpostmasters, application development and release management, migration from the on-premise datacentre to the cloud, and the establishment of a cloud-native back-office and channel platform.
Anastassi said many suppliers bid for this contract, known as Walk in and Take Over (WITO), and it has now “been whittled down to a handful”. He said this contract is vital due to the overall Horizon estate’s complexity.
“A lot of people think Horizon is the terminal that you see in a branch counter, but that is only the very front end of the service,” he said. “There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of those are managed by Fujitsu.”
According to a source, IBM is one of the suppliers bidding for this contract.
Meanwhile, Lot 2 will see a supplier named to provide an off-the-shelf EPOS system to replace the Horizon front end. Around a dozen suppliers bid for this contract, but Anastassi said this has been shortlisted to three. He added that many of the bidders for the EPOS replacement element lacked experience in Post Office environments. Computer Weekly is aware that Escher is one of the suppliers that has bid for the contract.
South Somerset-based subpostmaster Jim Gordon, who is part of a team known as ‘the doctor function’, which advises the Post Office in relation to the project, said Post Office branch business is rapidly changing and it requires an EPOS to suit it.
“The sort of things that I was doing a year ago are starting to die off now,” said Gordon. “I can’t tell you what a Post Office branch is going to look like in 2028 or 2030, but I know I need a platform that can give me the information I need to deliver a customer journey that’s flexible and adaptable.”
Anastassi told Computer Weekly that Fujitsu will be out eight to 12 months after both contracts are signed with suppliers this summer. He added that by 2030, “we will have eradicated what we now know as Horizon completely from our state. It won’t be there at all.”
He stated this date could be even earlier: “I don’t want to overcommit, so I’ll say 2030, but we are optimistic it will be ahead of that time.”
He said things have moved faster than the Post Office board expected. There are currently 260 IT staff working on the replacement project, a mix of Post Office internal workers and IT professionals from third-party suppliers.
As part of the Lot 1 contract, Anastassi said he expects staff currently working at Fujitsu on the Post Office Horizon contract to be moved to new suppliers as TUPE transfers.
“We’ve got very few people within the Post Office that do the things that Fujitsu do, they may have an overview and keep an eye on those things, but the majority is going to be from Fujitsu. It has a huge number of staff that do very specific things, so TUPE will apply,” added Anastassi.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).