BAA has inked a five-year £100m deal with outsourcing outfit Capgemini.

Under the agreement, 200 staff at BAA – which oversees the management of Heathrow, Stansted and four other UK airports – will be offered a transfer to Capgemini under TUPE conditions.

The deal gives Capgemini overarching responsibility to run BAA's core IT services, which include applications, infrastructure and projects, for around 10,000 users.

However, BAA retains responsibility for the company's overall IT strategy. It is not clear what will happen to the airport operator's remaining few hundred techie staff.

"Because our focus is on running airports, it makes sense for specialist IT functions to be outsourced, which is also much more cost effective," said BAA chief information officer Philip Langsdale.

"We want to improve our resilience and ensure that we have the right systems in place to share the right information at the right time," he said. "Capgemini will have a key role in supporting this." ®