NSW agency ditches Apples for Acer

Acer has won a bid to provide a new integrated point of sale terminal system to the NSW government’s newly-formed Roads and Maritime Authority (RMS).

The RMS was formed by the merger of New South Wales' Roads and Traffic Authority and Maritime Services.

New Acer terminals will replace 1300 aging second generation (“lampshade) iMacs in RMS service centres. The old hardware has been in service for over a decade, and has reached the end of its useful life, an RMS spokesperson told iTnews.

The replacement desktops were sourced through the ITS2007 panel. As such, the budget for the project has not been publicly disclosed.

According to an RMS representative, the hardware and integrated point of sale software was designed internally by the agency as part of the NSW Government’s Service NSW Initiative.

“The new terminals were designed and developed internally and will provide access to the RMS point of sale applications and administration functions not previously available from the iMac,” the RMS spokesperson said. “It will also enable integration with a replacement EFTPOS pin pad.”

The RMS has also contracted VMWare to provide a virtual desktop solution.

“A number of other key component decisions are being finalised," the spokesperson said. "A comprehensive change management plan is in place to help with the transition process.

"RMS has not finalised all components but we expect the iMac replacement will be an Acer desktop running two virtual machines - a Linux VM to host the RMS Point of Sale applications and a Windows VM to provide back office functionality such as employee self service. Customer service officers will be able to toggle between sessions," the spokesperson added.

The project is slated for completion in the third quarter of this year, by which time all the existing iMacs will have been replaced and all new software and hardware put in place.