​WA Govt goes with Datacom following $3 billion ICT tender

Giles Nunis - CIO, WA Government

Datacom has been selected to deliver the West Australian Government’s GovNext-ICT plan, edging out Dimension Data, Telstra and IBM in a $3 billion deal.

As revealed by The West Australian, the New Zealand-owned and operated company was selected alongside French and Japanese giants Atos and NEC, and will roll out a blend of data centre, server, cloud services, storage and telephone across all government departments.

But while the newspaper claims the “Datacom, NEC and Atos contracts are not yet set in stone”, negotiations are expected to take place in the coming weeks with WA Government CIO, Giles Nunis, who will then “pitch the plan to State Cabinet in three to four weeks.”

GovNext-ICT is an Office of the GCIO program that aims to provide Government with the enabling infrastructure upon which the DigitalWA strategic outcomes will be delivered, through simplifying its technology environments and better connecting them together.

Since launching the strategy in early May, the potential candidates were shortened from 76 to six, with smaller ICT businesses also set to be involved through partnering with the main players.

Labelled as “Australia’s biggest ever ICT contract” by The West Australian, the contract is expected to last up to 10 years, with annual savings of approximately $200-$300 million.

According to the Government, the GovNext-ICT will enable agencies to simplify the public sector ICT environment, resulting in less complex projects that are more likely to succeed, lower costs and reduced duplication and waste.

Delving deeper, the strategy aims to connect agencies through a common network and access to improved communications, increasing in-house collaboration and data sharing in the process.

“GovNext-ICT will enable government to move from its capital intensive, infrastructure-centric ICT operating model to an as-a-service, consumption-based operating model,” said GCIO CTO, Andrew Cann, via a Government announcement at the time of launch.

“Government currently has on-premise data centres and server rooms, and communications networks that are inadequate, disaggregated and duplicated.

“Government’s scarce resources are tied up maintaining these obsolete infrastructure practices that are not delivering modern capabilities.”

The selection of Datacom to deliver the GovNext-ICT contract completes a busy few months for the company, after revealing its National Network of interconnected data centres and digital assets in early August.

As reported by ARN, the National Network interconnects Datacom’s nine data centres spread across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and West Australia.

In short, the network will make almost every aspect of a customer’s IT infrastructure customisable, producing scalable solutions, in both speed and storage, reliability and security, while also catering to state data localisation laws.

In addition, the systems integrator has also recently announced the building of a $22 million IT hub in South Australia in 2017, a project which South Australian Premier, Jay Weatherill, said will create hundreds of new jobs and training opportunities.

Coupled with increased nationwide activity, the organisation is also now offering customers across Australia and New Zealand access to mixed and augmented reality technologies with Microsoft HoloLens.

Datacom declined to comment at the time of publication.