IBM has signed a five-year deal with Fire and Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW) to provide an as-a-service IT platform.
IBM will design, build and run the new as-a-service platform. It is also due to manage migration of FRNSW workloads, including the emergency services SAP system to the NSW Government Data Centres.
FRNSW uses one of the largest deployments of SAP’s emergency services system in the world. It hosts mission critical workloads for 100,000 staff and volunteers across five agencies in NSW.
IBM said the solution is designed to improve flexibility to cater for growth, deliver better IT resource utilisation, consolidate IT workloads and reduce the risk and cost of manual intervention through automation. FRNSW is one of the first NSW Government agencies to transform its business to an 'as a service' model.
Fire and Rescue New South Wales chief information officer, Richard Host, said the move provides the organisation with a system that is far more powerful than it would ordinarily be able to afford using traditional on-premise IT deployments.
“This new approach will enable FRNSW to identify and respond to hazards and emergencies in a faster and more informed way, minimising impact and enhancing the safety, quality of life, and confidence of our community."
FRNSW will deploy key workloads like SAP ERP, Oracle RAC and also its Geospatial Information on the IBM Cloud infrastructure based in the NSW Government Data Centre. The service is based on a flexible consumption based pricing model. IBM said its solution will deliver key business benefits like accelerated workload deployments with reusable patterns, management of all workloads through a single dashboard as well as better data management and efficiencies through Tivoli Storage Manager.
The move is in line with the NSW Government data centre reform initiative and ICT Strategy. It provides NSW Government agencies with the ability to improve service delivery within their own business, and supports the principle of sharing infrastructure and systems across agencies.
