Banks are finding it increasingly difficult to make money out of money these days – in fact most of them have become whizzes at making enormous losses on their loan books, so Barclays Bank Plc is having a go at making money out of software. Its Barclays Computer Operations has been officially launched as a trading company. Set up in 1991, it was formerly an in-house cost-centre of Barclays, servicing its UKP1,000m-a-year information technology requirement. Headquartered in Nutsford, Cheshire, the unit has 1,100 employees and a turnover of UKP150m. With four data centres in Poole, Manchester, Gloucester and London, it is targeting the UK financial sector, the UK end of global banks, US or Middle-East banks, service industry and multinationals. Nevertheless, it has had to bid for and has retained UKP15m-worth of internal contracts, while 50% of its prospective clients have had dealings with Barclays. Its services cover five main areas: facilities management, contingency planning, processing, project management and independent technical support and consultancy Its two most important areas of operation are facilities management and contingency as these are felt to be the two major growth markets in financial services. In addition, it has developed two new products, the Operator Presentation Manager and Data Place. The first is based on X Window technology and is shipping from June. Instead of having a lot of different control terminals from a variety of vendors with a variety of interfaces and keyboard layouts, a single workstation controls these multiple vendor systems in a graphical environment. It operates from a Unix server and is accessed by workstations connected on a local area network. DataPlace is a purpose-built, secure environment to run computer systems for customers that lack the space or capability to provide an in-house location themselves. It will be available later on in the current quarter.
