Home Affairs lays groundwork for IBM mainframe shift

The Department of Home Affairs is laying the foundations for the expiry of its long-standing mainframe agreement with IBM under a new ‘Future Compute’ strategy.

The department has signed a fresh $165 million contract with IBM for software licenses, hardware and hardware maintenance across its enterprise mainframe, alongside storage services.

The contract notably contains “transition-in activities” preparing for the June 2025 expiry of Home Affairs’ 18-year mainframe agreement with Big Blue, which is now worth $924 million.

Despite concerns around the future of the mainframe environment, the department opted for another four years in 2021, as it investigated how best to modernise the legacy infrastructure environment.

In a statement to iTnews, a Home Affairs spokesperson said this marked the “commencement of the future arrangements”.

ITnews understands that the fresh contract also marks what Home Affairs has called the ‘Future Compute’ strategy, which will separate the provision of IBM’s products and support away from managed services.

Writing on LinkedIn, IBM Australia and New Zealand managing director Nicholas Flood said the vendor was selected as the Future Compute Platform (FCP) provider following a "a rigorous competitive tender".

In his post, Flood said the platform will support "8.2 million air and traveller movements, 85.0 million air cargo consignments and 6.3 million sea cargo".

"Technologically, the win is a great example of the value of modernised mainframe and hybrid cloud architectures for workloads that demand the highest levels of performance, security, cost-optimisation and sovereign control," he added.

The department already has an active tender in place for a managed services supplier, which went live on 15 January 2024.

The new contract was signed through IBM’s whole-of-government arrangement via the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA).

As a result of the new Home Affairs contract, the initial $725 million whole-of-government arrangement, signed in January 2023, has now reached over $1 billion in value.