HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) plans to consolidate its data warehousing estate in a bid to cut costs and improve its effectiveness.
It will create a consolidated data warehouse to support its burgeoning range of business intelligence objectives in a project that is forecast to be completed in 2015.
Further reading
HMRC to move storage to the G-Cloud Two-fifths of companies fear financial penalties under new HMRC system for PAYE Interview: Phil Pavitt, CIO, HMRC
The tax-collecting organisation is currently drumming up interest among suppliers that might be interested in tendering for the project on www.publictenders.net and www.government-online.net.
"The HMRC data warehouse IT estate has evolved over many years and in consequence this environment has led to growth in the complexity and cost of warehousing data, a reduction in the responsiveness to new requirements, and complications in fully exploiting data," states HMRC in its tender document.
"HMRC plans to replace the bulk of its existing data warehouse capabilities with a new world-class enterprise IT solution. The aim is to modernise and streamline the extraction, transformation, and loading of data from diverse internal and external sources into a single warehouse that will support a wide range of critical business intelligence objectives and business processes."
It adds: "The Data Warehouse Consolidation Project will prepare our business for the new enterprise warehouse and we expect the project to be completed by 2015."
HMRC's data warehousing requirements have evolved over the years and include systems running on IBM AIX Unix 6.1, IBM z/OS 1.9, Microsoft Windows 2003 and Sun Solaris 10. The underlying databases include Oracle 9i, Oracle 10g , Oracle 11.1.07, IBM DB2 v5, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005.
It also runs extraction, transformation and loading tools (ETL) toolsets from vendors such as Informatica, Business Objects, with Data Integrator (BODI), Microsoft SQL Server 2000 DTS and PL/SQL. Data delivery and transfer service uses Unix Transfer Manager (UTM), Oracle Streams and Sybase Replication.
Overall data capacity requirements for the enterprise warehouse are based on early estimates of 150TB, which is growing at a rate of 10 per cent every year.
The tender follows an "initial market engagement" event attended by 32 major suppliers. Following the event, the suppliers who attended were given an opportunity to meet with HMRC on a one-to-one basis to discuss in more detail what the project aims to deliver.
The existing data warehouse estate is managed on behalf of HMRC by the department's strategic IT supplier Aspire, along with IT Solutions Delivery, which provides an in-house IT capability.
