VHA outsources corporate IT support to ASG

Multi-million dollar deal.

Vodafone Hutchison Australia has outsourced its corporate IT support to services giant ASG for at least five years.

ASG declined to disclose the value of the contract, which has two one-year extension options and room for "quite a few million in project services" on top, according to the company's chief officer for sales and strategic operations Murray Rosa.

But back-of-the-envelope calculations could put the base contract somewhere in the vicinity of $28 million.

Rosa said in a statement today that ASG had won "more than $140 million" in contracts across Australia this year.

Its last announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange on June 1 pegged that figure at $112 million, putting the VHA deal somewhere around $28 million, assuming no other significant deals had been won but were unannounced.

ASG is no stranger to Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) - it has held contracts delivering "end user computing support, IT service management, corporate servers" and other hosted services into Hutchison Australia since 2006.

The new contract covers all of those areas and some more, according to Rosa.

But it did not impinge on IT managed services contracts Hutchison holds with Ericsson.

"Ericsson currently provides service management for Hutchison's IT systems (which supports the 3 customer base) including billing, provisioning and service applications," a VHA spokeswoman said.

"This scope of work is currently under review."

VHA outsourced service management for key parts of its mobile network to Nokia-Siemens Networks in a seven year deal announced in May. Ericsson had held the managed services contract covering Hutchison's core network since 2002.

Ericsson and Huawei were unsuccessful in bidding for the network contract with the merged Vodafone and Hutchison entity.

NSW traction

Rosa told iTnews the VHA contract would provide ASG with "great traction in the NSW market" as it eyed similarly-sized commercial deals.

"It means a lot to us having more of these capabilities delivered over the Eastern seaboard," he said.