The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has got rid of about a quarter of its IT department by outsourcing it to Fujitsu and Xansa.

The firm will be giving 41 staff to Fujitsu and paying them £80.8m over 10 years to do infrastructure management. Xansa will be taking on 11 staff and getting £5.1m to do application development and support.

Fujitsu pitched it as a "transformational change" project.

FSA IT director Darryl Salmons told Computer Weekly he'd got rid of the "commodity" bits and kept the "strategic" stuff.

The department had previously been criticised by outsourcing advisor Orbys.

One hundred and four permanent staff and 100 contractors will be unaffected by the change. ®