There has been a flutter of activity across Federal and State Government agencies to shore up IT supplier contracts before the end of the financial year.
HP subsidiary, EDS, won a $96 million contract with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) to provide managed IT services. The deal is the first to come out of Commander’s lucrative Group 8 agency contracts with Federal Government.
Last year, the DAFF broke away from the Group 8 IT outsourcing agreement and its long-term relationship with embattled ASX-listed integrator, Commander, in favour of managing its own IT services contracts.
According to an EDS statement, it will provide desktop, server, storage and architecture services to the department over five years. The deal also encompasses help and service desk support to around 5000 staff over 300 locations, as well as DAFF’s overall storage and IT architecture and design services.
Head of consulting at Intermedium, Kevin Noonan, said the contract was a strategic and necessary win for EDS.
“EDS has in the past been very successful with tier-one agencies. It needed in a strategic sense to round out its customer base, and reaching into a key mid-tier agency is a sound move for EDS,” he said.
Commander, which went into receivership in August last year, took over the Group 8 outsourcing contracts when it acquired Volante Group in 2004. Late last year, the remaining outsourcing contracts were bought by listed Australian integrator, CSG.
Noonan said CSG needed to re-establish itself in the Canberra market.
“Winning over this existing government agency base was a risky proposition – this is a long-term challenge for them,” he said.
Other recent NSW Police tender wins include a $1.3 million deal, won by Fujitsu Australia, for software development to enable process flow for the Police Force Asset Confiscation System.
NEC also received a $2.5 million extension of the call centre technology contract with the Police Assistance Line in early March.
The NSW Department of Education and Training (DET) was also busy getting deals over the line, inking a tender with Tandberg and Dimension Data to provide additional teleconferencing equipment for schools.
The integrator has been involved in the DET’s Connected Classrooms program since its inception, and previously provided it with end point contact points, Dimension Data NSW State Manager, Pete Murray, said.
Under the four-year contract, Dimension Data and Tandberg will deliver a solution for the department to securely connect 2200 locations via multi-site high-definition video and audio conferencing.
Fellow outsourcer, Unisys, was also in the news, securing a $6 million contract with the NSW Police. The win was despite the Government agency losing $15 million a year over four years from its ICT budget.
Unisys will implement a shared imagery management system involving system customisation, hardware, software licences, support and training services for the Forensic Services Group and Operational Communications and Information Command to manage digital images and other digital records.
The integrator also recently signed a contract with Queensland Transport for five years to design and build a facial recognition and biometric matching platform for the state’s smartcard drivers’ licence.
A Unisys spokesperson confirmed the contract win, but was unavailable to comment further at time of publication.
