NEC wins Defence data centre migration work

Defence has formally signed an $800 million, eight-year centralised processing deal with Lockheed Martin after naming the US military contractor as its preferred contractor in May. 

Defence CIO Dr Peter Lawrence (front, left) and Head of Infrastructure Transformation Craig Magee (front, right) at the signing of the deal with Lockheed Martin.

Under the terms of the agreement, Lockheed Martin will help to consolidate the Defence data centre fleet from 280 computer rooms today down to 11 domestic and three international facilities and manage the remaining central infrastructure for the next eight years.

Defence CIO Dr Peter Lawrence said in a statement that the project will “deliver Defence a robust and secure technology environment…  simplifying our service provision and speeding up our response to change.”
 

Today it was revealed that NEC Australia, acting as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, will be doing much of the heavy lifting.

NEC Australia has won an IT infrastructure component of the job worth $150 million, providing both migration services and hosting of legacy systems until the end of the migration project.

Under the terms of the deal, NEC Australia will “re-host” Defence applications in the new facilities being set up by Lockheed Martin, run Defence’s legacy mid-range servers and storage in their existing facilities during the migration, and also decommission and dispose of this equipment once the new production environment is up and running.

NEC Australia invested in boosting its Australian skills in mid-2012 via the $227.5 million acquisition of CSG, taking on 800+ IT staff. CSG's technology solutions business has a dominating presence in Australia's Northern Territory, a key area of operations for Defence.

Access to skills has been a key consideration under Defence's outsourcing plans. Head of Infrastructure Transformation Craig Magee (pictured) conceded at the Australian Data Centre Strategy Summit earlier this year that finding "the right amount of people certified" with the necessary security clearance to work on Defence systems "is going to be a real challenge."

Defence’s procurement reform program aims to save Australia's largest IT shop some $1.9 billion by simplifying its supply relationships down to fewer vendors under three major bundles of work. The terrestrial communications bundle was awarded to Telstra in April 2013 for $1.1 billion. The only remaining bundle - for distributed computing services - has been postponed until 2016.

Stay tuned for iTnews’ guide to data centre migration, due within a fortnight.