Finance puts 30 suppliers on opt-in panel

The Department of Finance has appointed its 30th supplier for a new, non-mandatory ICT services panel.

The panel was established late last month, following a multi-year effort to reduce 87 ICT services panels to four and a Government policy to halve the number of ICT services panels from 120 to 57 by December 2014.

It covers applications development, systems integration, project management and managed services, and includes Fujitsu Australia, Data#3, SMS Management & Technology, UXC, and Southern Cross Computer Systems, and as of this week, Datacom.

The Finance Department first tendered for the three-year panel of vendors last November. The supplier panel runs until June 26, 2015.

To date, the non-mandatory panel has been used by the Department of Finance, Australian Electoral Commission, Comsuper and the Future Fund Management Agency, with other agencies able to procure services under separate, multi-agency arrangements.

Datacom today announced that it would also supply commercial off the shelf (COTS) software and hardware under the panel agreement by providing Citrix, Commvault, HP, McAfee and Oracle solutions.

Since July last year, Datacom has participated in $23 million worth of deals with federal agencies -- none of which were Finance, according to Federal tender site Austender.

More than half of those contracts, valued at $14 million, have been with the ACCC. Datacom also won deals with the AFP, Defence, and the Office of National Assessments, for a combined total of more than $1 million.