Post Office seeks more Horizon support as it continues hunt for replacement

Someone has got to keep those back end systems running

The beleaguered UK Post Office has begun conversations with suppliers to help support its controversial Horizon system in a set of contracts which could total £100 million ($131 million) as it works to replace the EPOS and back-end finance technology.

In a procurement advertisement, the government-owned retail post office company says it is seeking tech suppliers to help "provision the Horizon Data Centre Operations related to both the two datacenters in Belfast, Northern Ireland and some test environments at other locations in the UK, for example Stevenage & Bracknell." The Prior Information Notice confirms this contract award is estimated to be worth up to £45 million ($59 million).

Work is set to involve onsite support at the primary and secondary datacenters in Belfast. This is intended to include datacenter building, physical security and datacenter operations such as patching, hardware upgrades, incident resolution, and systems management.

At the same time, the Post Office is also looking for a tech supplier to provide network services for its datacenters, again those based in Belfast, in a project worth up to £10 million ($13 million).

Lastly, the organization wants to bring on board fresh support for the Horizon application. The contractor might be expected to provide incident and problem management, manage the development, change cycle and testing for codebase supporting Horizon (primarily in Java) as well as Oracle database support. This element of the procurement is also worth £45 million ($59 million).

The contract notice for all three procurements is scheduled to be published in June.

Horizon is an EPOS and back-end finance system for thousands of Post Office branches around Britain, first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company later bought by Fujitsu. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were wrongfully convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame. A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice launched in 2021 and is ongoing.

While the Post Office ponders spending £100 million supporting Horizon, it continues to plan a replacement.

In April, the Post Office kicked off procurement to help build the system replacing Horizon. A tender notice said vendors interested in working on a replacement system should sign a non-disclosure agreement.

"Post Office is in the process of replacing its existing EPOS system, known as Horizon," the notice said, putting the contract price at around £75 million ($94 million).

However, Neil Brocklehurst, interim chief executive, said in a memo to staff the organization was "reassessing and reprioritising" the replacement system, known as the New Branch IT (NBIT) program, according to The Telegraph. ®