NSW Transport reveals infrastructure outsourcing timeline

Transport for NSW is set to sign two major infrastructure outsourcing deals before the end of 2014, as its works to break up monolithic contracts and replace them with a “next generation” sourcing scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Across the state's Transport cluster, a number of agency-based infrastructure deals are drawing to a close, giving the lead body the opportunity to launch a reformed buying strategy and infrastructure renewal expected to cost $150 million up front and $100 million in operating costs each year.

“The expiry of key agency IT infrastructure services outsourcing contracts has created a once in a generation opportunity to consolidate the Transport cluster onto shared state-of-the-art IT infrastructure services platforms and leverage the scale of the cluster to reduce costs," the agency revealed in tender documents.

It has repackaged the work into three major bundles: data centre; end user computing; and networks. Each will be supervised by an overarching vendor management function.

After approaching the market with an expression of interest in June last year, Transport for NSW is preparing to sign the first of these deals before the end of 2014.

Tender documents released this week reveal the department hopes to ink the data centre deal by September 26.

The agency will then begin the migration of roughly 3000 servers and 4 petabytes of stored data from 20 distributed data centres and computer rooms into one of the NSW Government data centres, located in Silverwater and Unanderra.

The end user computing contract is scheduled to follow by 19 December 2014.

The cluster consolidation being overseen by Transport for NSW takes in around 30,000 staff and 500 sites from agencies like Roads and Maritime Services, Sydney Trains, and NSW Trains and ferry operators, creating a high level of IT complexity.

Under the EUC deal, Transport for NSW wants to see a single collaboration platform rolled out to replace legacy environments. It expects its PC fleet to cover 25,000 users, and is also forecasting the addition of up to 10,000 mobile devices.

As part of its networks bundle, in which a single “next generation” data and telecommunications network will be built to replace existing legacy networks, Transport for NSW plans to sign a managed network services vendor in April 2015 and a voice/mobile vendor in January 2015.

One of the largest outsourcing deals to be replaced by the ‘next generation infrastructure services’ (NGIS) program is RMS’ long running relationship with Fujitsu, which started with data centre hosting in 1997.

Fujitsu is one of the 25 IT companies recorded as responding to the June 2013 NGIS EOI request, alongside Indian-based outsourcers Infosys, HCL, Tata and Wipro, plus global giants HP, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Unisys.