Huge govt tender goes to shortlists
Huge govt tender goes to shortlists
A tender from the Federal Department of Finance and Administration has whittled down its choice for hardware suppliers for 250 electoral offices down to several shortlists, with the big winners being Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Dell and Iomega.
The tender, entitled Electorate Office IT Services, is for the delivery of IT services to 226 Federal Senators and MPs, plus their 1,200-strong staff in around 240 electorate offices in everywhere except Parliament House itself, as well as the offices of every living former Prime Minister. Equipment to be supplied includes desktop PCs, laptops, printers, operating systems, pocket PCs, network attached storage (NAS) devices, scanners and smart label machines. The Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) has retained IT Newcom as sourcing consultants to the project.
While the tender is ostensibly for services companies, to replace incumbent provider CSC, the specification of the tender effectively mandate hardware providers as well, by limiting tender replies to address particular manufacturers. The shortlisted vendors for desktop and laptop equipment are IBM, Toshiba, Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Ipex. Possible printer suppliers include Lexmark and HP. Dell and Iomega are the choices for NAS equipment. Finally, HP and Toshiba have been chosen as suppliers of PDAs and PocketPC equipment.
Scott Dillon, senior manager for business development for Iomega Australia/NZ, said that his company had been asked by DFA to provide three extra test boxes, beyond the three originally requested.
"Even if we don't win it, they have had our product for many months, and they have been evaluated to the nth degree by the parliamentary people," he said.
As part of the standard operating environment, PCs will run Windows 2000 and laptops will run Windows 98, but both will be migrated to Windows XP. The existing technology set of the electoral offices is comprised of Ipex PCs, Toshiba laptops and Lexmark printers.
DFA and the Department of Parliamentary Reporting Staff (DPRS), the latter of which will maintain control over systems in Parliament House, gave an industry briefing on the tender process several weeks ago. Heather Chapman, director of client services for the DPRS outlined its so-called One Office vision, where public servants and electorate office workers could get "access to files stored on file servers in Parliament House or NAS devices in electorate offices regardless of where they are accessing the systems", according to documents on government Web sites.
The tender is due to close on January 6 of next year, with a signed contract expected by March 28, and a full hand-over of responsibilities to occur by July 1.
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