​WA government finalises contracts for IT overhaul

The Western Australian government has finalised contracts with Atos, Datacom and NEC to deliver its $3 billion, five-year GovNext-ICT technology overhaul.

The government is looking to cut spending on ICT infrastructure by up to 25 per cent to gain savings of up to $80 million annually.

The vendor trio edged out Dimension Data, Telstra and IBM to win the multi-billion dollar deal in a competitive tender last September.

“The contracts with Atos, Datacom and NEC will save an estimated $65 million to $80 million in ICT infrastructure expenditure as the government moves to a regime where agencies only pay for what they use,” innovation minister, Bill Marmion said in a statement.

Under its overhaul, the WA government is consolidating its 60-plus data centres into a small number of high-grade facilities with a multi-tenanted community cloud. It is also moving the majority of its compute and storage to public and private clouds; establishing a whole-of-government unified network with secure connected to public cloud providers; and rolling out a user self-provisioning capability.

Government agencies will purchase through one contract where the three vendors will continuously compete to sell their ICT infrastructure services. The WA government says this will reduce procurements costs and delays for both government and suppliers.

Application support and project management services will continue to be delivered under the existing common use arrangements the government has in place with local suppliers.

Marmion said the new ICT procurement regime would enable a cost-effective roll out of Digital WA, a strategy that is aiming to for 70 per cent of transactions with government to be done online by 2020.

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Follow Byron Connolly on Twitter: @ByronConnolly