Atos, Datacom and NEC set to win big from WA’s GovNext: Report

Dimension Data, IBM and Telstra miss out

Atos, Datacom and NEC have been selected for the Western Australian government’s $3 billion GovNext program, according to a West Australian report.

The GovNext program is intended to save up to $650 million over 10 years, with state government departments and agencies moving away from operating their own IT infrastructure to consuming commercially provided compute, storage and network services.

Dimension Data, IBM and Telstra were also in the running for the contract. The GovNext agreements are still to be finalised and are subject to cabinet approval.

In November, the state government said that the departments of health, education, the attorney general, corrective services, transport, and finance had signed on to the program. In addition, WA Police, Main Roads, and the Public Transport Authority had agreed to shift to GovNext.

The state government has said it is the most significant ICT project in WA’s history

The initiative is being led by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO) and the WA Department of Finance. The state government in September appointed Giles Nunis to the role of government CIO, tasking him with driving more efficient IT spending

There is “no reason for the WA government to buy, own and operate its own infrastructure,” WA finance minister Bill Marmion said last year.

“GovNext-ICT is the most significant government ICT project in WA history. It is estimated that if we continue along with the current ‘own and operate’ model, we will be forced to spend over $3 billion on ICT infrastructure in the next 10 years.”

“The GovNext-ICT Program will initiate a transformative shift from a ‘commodity based’ purchaser under an ‘owner operator’ infrastructure model to a ‘consumption based’ purchaser under a ‘services’ infrastructure model,” stated documents issued last year as part of an initial expression of interest process.

“It aims to utilise the maturing capability of the private sector to provide flexible cloud-based compute, network and storage infrastructure services that match demand with capacity.”

The documents said that government was seeking respondents capable of potentially providing the state government with data centre co-location services as part of a data centre consolidation program, multi-tenanted private cloud capability with public cloud integration that can house the government's 18,000+ virtual servers, and a state-wide communication network for government agencies.

The WA government has been approached for comment.

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