Atos Origin lands £46.7m Government Gateway deal

Will run online e-government service from next year...

Atos Origin has won a £46.7m contract with the Cabinet Office to run the Government Gateway secure ecommerce service from next year.

The Government Gateway is a secure authentication platform that allows businesses and individual members of the public to communicate and transact with government departments for online services such as filing tax returns.

The government had originally planned to create a single data centre to join up the three building blocks of the UK's e-government push - the Government Gateway, the information-sharing Knowledge Network, and the content management system Delivering on the Promise - as part of an £83m deal with ITNet (now part of Serco). But that deal collapsed in 2004 when the Cabinet Office terminated the ITNet contract.

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Atos Origin will now take responsibility for the design, build and operation of the service and development of Government Gateway from the end of 2006, and the contract will run for an initial five-year period up to 31 March 2011.

John Suffolk, UK government CIO, said in a statement: "The Government Gateway is a key component of common infrastructure and supports the public sector response to the ambitious challenge for shared services set out in the Transformational Government paper, presented to parliament in November 2005."