SA govt moves to replace $268m IT support deal

The South Australian government has taken the first step towards replacing the state’s decade-long server management outsourcing deals with IT heavyweights DXC Technology and NEC.

The Department of Premier and Cabinet this week kicked off a fact finding exercise to lay the groundwork for replacing the longstanding government-wide Distributed Computing Support Services (DCSS) arrangement.

The mandatory DCSS contract, which was initially signed EDS and CSG back in 2007, provides agencies with server management and support services from DXC and NEC.

Its most recent incarnation was established in July 2014, with the government estimating at the time that $267.5 million would be spent over the six-year life of the deal.

But with the 2014 agreement set to expire in June 2020, the department’s Office of Technology has set about reviewing government’s server management needs and how these might change in the future.

It wants to understand how “the market currently provide services to manage servers” and how this might change over five years ahead of a new Management, Design and Assurance Services (MDAS) deal.

The new deal will components covered under the existing contracts like on-premise server management, solution design and advisory services and service integration services support, as well as hosting services for IaaS-style systems hosted in an on premise or local data centre.

However, the office will also look to embed cloud platform management services within the new deal to meet the “emerging trend of using cloud-based services”.

The government has taken the swing behind cloud service into account with other recent IT contracts, including its recently resigned government-wide mainframe outsourcing deal with DXC.

The cloud management component would see panellists operate cloud platform systems such as portal and tenancies on behalf of agencies. This would occur either within the agency or externally.

“There is likely to be a need for third party suppliers to operate the cloud platform systems (accounts, portals and tenancies) on behalf of State Agencies to achieve their business outcomes,” the request for information states.

“The SA Government may enter into its own contracts with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google etc, or it may rely on Cloud Service Providers to provide these arrangements as part of the overall service.”