Professional Services

2007 developments

• Local Government Services: Continued its strong performance in 2007, successfully completing Phase 2 of our 10 year partnership with Swindon BC and becoming preferred bidder for Hart DC, a 10 year deal worth approx £10m. We also began our 15 year partnership with Southampton CC in October. Our service offering has been expanded to meet the growing demand from clients, in particular for customer services and procurement activities.
• Local Government Software Services: Our local government service and software businesses continue to work closely together to help clients increase operational efficiencies to meet the challenges set out in the Comprehensive Spending Review. We continue to set the highest standards for our products and have become the first major supplier to local government to achieve the Payment Card Industry Data Security standard (PCI DSS) for our payment management products and services.
• Children’s Services: We have successfully brought together and refocused our education service offering in response to the Every Child Matters – Change for Children programme and are recognised as leading providers of consultancy, interim management and software support to children's services authorities. We have increased our market share in existing markets and entered new markets such as software services for Children’s Social Care, Early Years provision (through our acquisition of CPFR) and Learning Gateways in schools – providing pupils, staff and parents with secure remote access to information. Additionally, 94% of our further and higher education clients renewed their software licenses for a further three years.
• Private sector software: The benefit of integrating our three recent acquisitions – Quay (back office and client relationships), Webline (quotation and ebusiness) and Synaptic (life, pensions and investment research) – was demonstrated in 2007 with the release of the Enabler modular website for independent financial advisers (IFAs). By combining and integrating these companies’ services, we can enable IFAs to enhance their client service and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.

2008 priorities

• Maintain market share in the local government and education software markets through continued development of new and innovative products to keep pace with changing requirements
• Expand software services private sector offering and increase leverage from other divisions
• Continue to enhance market leading position in local government through joint initiatives with other Capita businesses and through partnerships
• Continue to explore opportunities and synergies across private sector software and document management and imaging services
• Continue to build on the success of our National Strategies contract and further strengthen our relationship with the DCSF.