Towergate appoints Accenture to tackle IT 'infrastructure issue'

Towergate has hired Accenture to co-ordinate a complete overhaul of its IT infrastructure and address the challenges posed by legacy systems and a lack of integration.

Under the five-year deal Accenture will migrate and run Towergate’s core applications and infrastructure in the public cloud.

Towergate chief operations officer Adrian Brown said the transformation would give the broker the platform it needed to accelerate growth and enable front line staff to be competitive.

At the broker’s 2015 nine month results, during a conference call, chief executive David Ross said that the broker needed to tackle its infrastructure issue before it could contemplate further acquisitions.

At the time Ross estimated that the company was running between 60 and 80 different versions of OpenGI and had 600 servers, which had created extra work for the business and was making the customer journey “very frustrating”.

The transformation programme that Accenture will be undertaking will focus on:

• Networks
• Data centres
• End-user computing

Accenture will also manage service support across the whole IT platform.

Brown added: “This is a clear signal that we are committed to a turnaround plan that is now in its early stages, enabling efficient integration across Towergate.

“To ensure we pave the way for growth, we are transforming our entire IT infrastructure to positively change how we run our business and serve our diverse client base.

“We chose Accenture to help lead this programme to build a stable, scalable and flexible infrastructure to support our future vision.”