BATTERIES & CHARGERS FEATURE


Technology contract awarded for battery development centre


IT solutions provider CDWhas been awarded a £6m contract to provide end-to-end technology services at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), currently under construction in the West Midlands


The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) is currently under development


communications, email, audio-visual facilities for meeting rooms and mission-critical applications. Penny Williams, public sector sales


director at CDW, says: “We are immensely proud to be supporting this exciting project, which has the potential to propel the UK to the forefront of international battery technology innovation. “The team at UKBIC approached us


C


DW was selected as the project’s IT services and solutions partner,


following a competitive tender process overseen by Coventry City Council. The council is collaborating in a consortium with the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG), based at the University of Warwick, and Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), to develop the most advanced facility of its kind ever created in the UK. The project has been awarded £129m


of public funding as part of the Government’s Faraday Battery Challenge. UKBIC aims to help industrial partners design, test and commercialise next generation battery technologies when it officially opens in spring 2020. It will initially focus on partnerships in the automotive sector but expects to expand into other industry sectors as it grows. As part of a five-year agreement, CDW is


working with UKBIC to deliver a complete portfolio of integrated technology solutions that will enable an expected workforce of up to 200 IT users to carry out vital work at the 20,000m2


centre. The IT programme comprises of five


main work streams from CDW: Data centre: Design, build,


pre-configuration and shipping of a hybrid data centre model including cloud back-up and disaster recovery services. This includes CDW’s CloudCare service, which supports public cloud optimisation.


 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING | FEBRUARY 2020 11 Networking: Networking infrastructure


for LAN and Wi-Fi connectivity throughout the facility. Managed services: A five-year


agreement to provide core infrastructure support, equipment maintenance, agile platform management for apps and operating systems, device enrolment and management, full-time monitoring, break-fix services and on-demand engineering capability. Security: End-to-end security


provision to protect valuable data across the entire IT estate, including identity and access management, firewalls and endpoint protection. Workspace: A full suite of productivity


and collaboration tools including laptops, mobile phones, unified


with a multi-faceted brief that has involved almost every aspect of our integrated technology solutions. The provision of highly available and responsive infrastructure was key, but we also had to incorporate best-in-class security to protect the highly sensitive data that UKBIC will be handling.” UKBIC is committed to enabling the


Jonathan Browning (chair of the Coventry and Warwickshire LEP), Andy Street (mayor of the West Midlands), Tony Harper (head of the Faraday Battery Challenge), and minister Andrew Stephenson on a tour of the UKBIC site


development of the next generation of battery systems across electrode, cell, module and pack levels to allow companies to move to full scale, high volume battery manufacturing and high volume electric vehicle production as subsequent investments. Through industrial collaboration,


UKBIC will accelerate opportunities for the most promising early and mid-stage research and development activities to feed through into scale up and commercial exploitation.


CDW uk.cdw.com


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