Years after UK Post Office scandal broke, Accenture and OneView Commerce bag contract to replace Horizon

Summary

PaaS + IaaS Years after UK Post Office scandal broke, Accenture and OneView Commerce bag contract to replace Horizon Service tries to move on from troubled decades of Fujitsu relationship with £410 million in deals for system that hurt so many The UK Post Office has awarded Accenture and OneView Commerce contracts worth £410 million to replace its troubled Horizon systems, which contributed to one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in British history. Accenture has won the bidding to replace incumbent supplier Fujitsu — which built the error-prone PoS and finance system starting from 1996 — on a so-called Walk In Take Over basis. It is set to stabilize services and upgrade software as it prepares for a complete business transformation and manages the migration to new SaaS. Its deal is worth £269 million for five years plus two optional single-year extensions, according to a procurement notice. The lesser-known OneView Commerce — a provider of retail and inventory management SaaS — has won the £141 million agreement to provide software to “transform [the Post Office's] retail technology platform to meet evolving business, operational, and customer requirements,” according to a tender notice. The system is set to be cloud-hosted, in an AWS or equivalent environment, and allows bespoke customization according to the Post Office's needs. It is expected to include ePOS, mobile services, customer engagement and insight, and self-service kiosks, among other features. The Post Office began rolling out the legacy Horizon IT system for accounting in 1999, along with two subsequent upgrades. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were wrongfully prosecuted and convicted over errors resulting from the computer system, devastating lives in the process. A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice launched in 2021 is ongoing. Its first report was published in July last year, finding that senior Post Office staff in the UK – and those working for supp...