WA government gets $3-billion digital transformation underway

Published on the 24/01/2017 | Written by Newsdesk


WA govt digital transformation

Three suppliers appointed to assist government of Western Australia to implement its whole-of-government digital transformation program…

The Western Australian (WA) Government has selected NEC, Datacom and Atos to lead its GovNext-ICT program, which is expected to cost some $3-billion over 5 years. This whole-of-government IT program is operated by WA’s Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO) and is intended to help WA Government agencies undertake a digital transformation of all their ICT Services.

This includes the migration of on premise ICT infrastructure to a hybrid cloud architecture on a unified state-wide network in a consumption based model.

In a statement, NEC Australia said its work on the GovNext-ICT program will position the WA Government to fully exploit the emergence of as-a-service consumption of ICT services, while improving its ability to deliver modern and stable computing infrastructure.

The appointment of the three vendors ‘marks the beginning of an exciting new digital era for the public sector’, according to innovation minister Bill Marmion.  “The new arrangements will modernise technology across government and provide the technical platform for the State’s ICT Strategy Digital WA,” he said.

The WA Government is expecting to achieve ‘up to 40 percent cost savings through reduced licensing fees and infrastructure costs and improved efficiency’, with anticipations of reduced costs in building management, insurance, and hardware maintenance. It doesn’t stop there, either: additional benefits apparently include improved physical and data security, and more resilient infrastructure to support disaster recovery and business continuity objectives.

The multi-year contract with NEC Australia covers data centre co-location services, private cloud services, public cloud integration, network and communication services, identity management and ICT operations.

NEC will implement a cloud brokerage service that will enable Government agencies to consume infrastructure (IaaS) and platforms (PaaS) under a utility model.  This brokerage model means that agencies can access the best-pricing for ICT services, with standardised and easy to understand consumption payment models.

Meanwhile, Datacom’s statement said it will, in partnership with the other vendors, establish a broad range of cloud and telecommunication services that will be provided on a ‘whole of government’ basis to underpin the government’s digital strategy in a five-year contract, which comes with a five-year extension option. Datacom said this will see the WA Government consolidate its existing infrastructure to scalable platforms located in a small number of data centres.

For its part, Atos said it provides ‘a scalable hybrid cloud service with enterprise grade service levels to enable the WA government to cost effectively improve time-to-deploy services and software products, improve software deployment reliability and orchestrate cloud assets across Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Co-location architectures’.

To meet business objectives of the GovNext-ICT program, said Atos, it is providing a transformational Hybrid Cloud Solution built with technologies from Dell/EMC and VMware and managed through ServiceNow.

WA’s agencies across education, health, public safety, finance, transport, roads, community services and more are expected to benefit from the transition to a government-wide service model that allows each agency to select the most appropriate solution for its environment.

Overall, said NEC, the GovNext-ICT program aims to simplify technology, improve inter-agency network connectivity and interaction, and provide the community with transparent and efficient digital government services.

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