NSW Govt to sell ac3

The NSW Government is looking to offload the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications and has approached the market for indications of interest.

ac3 is wholly owned by the NSW government and provides ICT infrastructure, cloud and collaboration services to both public and private sector clients.

The move forms part of the government’s ICT Strategy for 2012, which eschewed a concrete roadmap in favour of an ‘evolving’ strategy, reviewed annually.

"A high level qualitative review of ac3 recommended market testing the potential sale of the ac3 business," a NSW Department of Finance and Services spokesperson told iTnews.

ac3 currently provides technical support, systems and network management, professional services, infrastructure and platform services, application services, and mobility management. 

Its office is located in Sydney’s Australian Technology Park. ac3 had 50 staff as of March, and earned $15 million in revenue for the 2012 financial year — 80 percent of that contributed by the NSW Government. It has 48 other customers. 

ac3 will continue with its contract to migrate all of the NSW Government’s current data centres into two at Silverwater and Unanderra, in July and August this year respectively. 

Several existing NSW Government data centres are located in Global Switch in Sydney alongside one of ac3’s data centres. 

The state government will accept registrations of interest in the sale of ac3 until the 23 May, which will then be assessed by an evaluation panel.

The panel will decide which bidders will be invited to participate in the bidding phase. 

The winner is expected to be announced in June.