Three-year data deal broadens NEC’s NSW Police presence

The NSW Police Force has handed the support and maintenance of its statewide data infrastructure to outsourcer NEC Australia in a $12m contract that will see NECmanage thousands of police endpoints across the force’s more than 500 urban and regional stations.

NEC has been managing the NSW Police voice network for the past eight years, but the addition of data to the managed services contract represents a significant expansion, Sam Iacono, NEC’s NSW sales manager for unified communications, told GTR.

“We have expanded the scope of that relationship to encapsulate their data infrastructure, and to have a holistic view of the complete data network,” Iacono explained.

“From a reliability, monitoring and SLA perspective we have a lot more visibility and control, and can guarantee the uptime of the network better than ever.”

NEC will muster the support of 25 business partners to provide 24x7 support for data services for NSW Police corporate offices in Parramatta and Sydney, as well as managing services within its 000 Support Centre and Police Assistance Line contact centre in Tuggerah.

The environment across these facilities involves equipment from a range of services, with older TDM technologies expected to eventually migrate towards Voice over IP (VoIP) replacements.

“This is a great example of government and industry working together to strengthen the state’s ICT sector,” deputy premier, minister for trade and investment and minister for regional infrastructure and services Andrew Stoner said in a statement.

“This contract will generate significant investment in ICT infrastructure, training and employment opportunities.”

The scope of the contract includes the Genesys call centre system, Cisco Call Managers, Cisco switches, routers, firewalls, wireless LAN, and IP networks – responsibility for which has been assumed from NSW Police Force’s Business and Technology Services (BTS) team.

To support the multi million-dollar contract, NEC has expanded its new network operations centre (NOC) in St Leonards, which will provide it with a base to support additional government contracts in the future. The contract commenced on 1 October.

“We’re leveraging all of our suppliers into tangible solutions,” Iacono said. “With the skills we’ve got in the industry to support these customers, we find we can really support them to sweat their assets, drive efficiencies and ensure that whatever they have, from a budgeting perspective, is well driven.”

“We’re freeing up NSW Police time to do what they should be doing: we’ll focus on keeping the network up and running, and they can focus on doing what police do best: protecting the community.” – David Braue