Under tight financial constraints, Amtrak last year signed a seven-year, $330 million deal with IBM that involves outsourcing most of the passenger railroad's IT services, including operation of its voice and data networks. Amtrak CIO Bob Galey recently spoke with Network World Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan about how best to structure and manage a network outsourcing arrangement. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Defining responsibility with your outsourcer
Top voice and data priorities
Aging technology
Advice to those considering outsourcing
Online-exclusive questions

What do you oversee?

My office handles all of the IT except for the train control systems. We have a very large reservation system and associated Web sites. We also have an awful lot of financial systems. We keep track of who the crews are on the trains and where they are, the customers on the trains, and all the incidents that happen on the trains. We have 530 stations where we pick up people. We have a network connecting half of those stations, and the other half are through dial-up. It's a frame relay network. We have about 7,000 desktops and two fairly large mainframes. We have 450 servers that we support. We also support the voice network.

Given that you've outsourced most of your IT services to IBM, what IT functions have you retained?

I have a staff of 296 people. The vast majority are software developers. That [function] is not outsourced. And we don't outsource [operation and maintenance of] our servers. We oversee the outsourcing agreement in two ways: the administration of the contract and the operation of the contract. We take the lead on planning for our LANs but not for the WAN. IBM works with AT&T on our WAN. IBM has about 150 full-time equivalents that support us.

How do you and IBM divide responsibility for Amtrak's voice and data networks?

We have an internal voice network that connects all of our sites so you don't have to dial out to place a call. That's probably a quarter of our budget for voice. The vast majority of our budget in voice has to do with our call centers, which use inbound 800 services. The call centers cost about $12 million to $13 million a year. IBM has responsibility for the switches and desktops in the call centers, but we man them. We plan the technology upgrades for the call centers along with IBM.