Licence deal secures £1m saving for forces

The Police ICT Company (PICTCo) has secured a licence deal with Adobe to provide police forces with digital media software at reduced cost under one contract.

It says this will offer a bespoke, cost-effective purchasing option, delivering upwards of £1 million immediate cashable savings and long-term efficiency savings, as well as increased software options and services to policing.

The three-year enterprise term licence agreement contract will be centrally managed by PICTo.

In the first instance 25 forces – representing 63 per cent of the UK police workforce – have signed up to the agreement. PICTCo said more forces have expressed interest in “coming on board with the deal later this year”.

PICTCo chief executive officer Martin Wyke said: “Policing over the years has faced a challenge with decentralisation of software, making it difficult to manage, with restrictions to critical updates/patches and accessibility issues when software is not suitable for secure networks.

Short-term measures to reduce costs often come at the expense of a reduction in services or updates that, in the long-term, can create security concerns and reduced access to cricitical software changes.

“The major benefit of this new agreement is in its simplicity and ability to be extended, as member forces are able to deploy the products to colleagues above a five per cent minimum user licence threshold at no cost and without the need to undertake onerous software asset management.”

Mr Wyke said PICTCo had worked hard with Adobe “to negotiate a deal that is attractive to participating members”.

“As a single client we have been able to generate prices that an individual force could not achieve,” he added.

The benefits of the agreement include:

•Acrobat Professional on a site licence for all participating police forces;

•Transferability of creative and print and publishing products between participating police forces;

•The ability to include additional future products for ease of licensing with participating police forces;

•Long-term reduction in costs associated to licensing compared with ad-hoc programmes;

•Ease of software deployment through an ‘enterprise dashboard’;

•Full flexibility to updates and upgrades;

•Full compliance for the contract term;

•Anonymous offline deployment of software suited to secure environments; and

•A high level of service and support from Adobe direct.

Peter Cummings, Adobe’s director public sector EMEA, said: “Adobe is delighted with this groundbreaking agreement with the Police ICT Company, which provides police forces with the most efficient and economical way to licence Adobe software. The focus has been to simplify software management so that police forces can now concentrate on the value from using the latest versions of Adobe products. It will also be much easier to share best practice and new innovations.”

PICTCo, which was set up in 2012 and officially launched last year, is designed to provide a “coordinated and overarching IT strategy” that will enable the development of a national police IT framework to help forces align and harmonise their local systems. So far it has:

•Rationalised contracts with IBM across the country for its analytical products, which has so far resulted in savings of £3 million;

2.Realised savings of £110,000 in one force as the result of a pilot ‘deep dive’ analysis;

3.Supported collaborative IT activities in the South East and South West regions;

4.Coordinated Police Innovation Fund projects, including providing advice to forces;

5.Supported an independent review of the National Firearms Licensing Management System and proposals for implementing an online transactions capability to allow the public to apply and pay for firearms licenses online. The review has resulted in a revised programme that will see forces and the public benefiting from improved services sooner and create more efficient processes in forces; and

6.Worked with the Home Office to support the development of an evidence base for