SA Government Picks New Trio for ICT Services

April 25, 2007: The South Australian government has closed off the first round of its lucrative ICT sourcing contract, naming HP, Volante and EDS as the three joint winners for the $120 million plus deal.

For the last ten years, the SA government has had an exclusive relationship with EDS for all of its ICT infrastructure services. However, as part of the state’s new Future ICT Services Arrangements program, this relationship has been terminated in favour of a right tool for the right job approach.

In December 2002, the Treasurer announced that the State Government did not intend to renew or extend the EDS Agreement, saying “the Government’s requirements had changed significantly since the start of that Agreement, making new arrangements necessary.” In 2003 it began moving away from the exclusive relationship with EDS in favour of a selective sourcing model for ICT infrastructure services, achieving savings of $30 million per annum.

“The outcomes have vindicated the Government's decision not to continue with a single, large scale, all-encompassing deal, such as that struck with EDS,” said South Australian Infrastructure Minister Patrick Conlon. “The Government's approach has been to selectively source its ICT goods and services from best-of-breed suppliers, with a focus on services and value for money, and the results speak for themselves.”

To date, the state’s services have been split between:

• Distributed Computing Support Services – EDS, Hewlett-Packard & Volante
• GRN Upgrade – Telstra
• Internet Service Provider (ISP) Services – Internode
• Mainframe Computing Services – EDS
• Managed Network Services - Dimension Data
• Messaging and Anti-spam services – Telstra
• Reseller Services – Commander, Comunet, Dimension Data & Volante
• PABX Maintenance & Support Services – NEC

While equipment & Software contracts have been awarded to:

• Active Devices – Cisco
• Anti-virus software Licensing - Computer Associates, McAfee & Trend Micro
• Digital Handsets and PABX Components – NEC
• Midrange servers and associated software licensing - Sun Microsystems
• Notebooks – Acer & Dell
• Personal Computers – Dell, Hewlett-Packard & Volante
• Photocopiers – Cannon, Fuji-Xerox, Kyocera-Mita & Ricoh
• Printers - Hewlett-Packard, Kyocera-Mita & Ricoh
• Servers - Hewlett-Packard
• Software licensing – Checkpoint, Citrix, Ingres Corporation, Microsoft, Novell & Oracle

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