WA said to select winners for $3bn GovNext project

The Western Australian government has reportedly selected the winners of the planned $3 billion GovNext-ICT project, which aims to transition the government from an owner to a mere consumer of ICT infrastructure.

France's Atos, New Zealand's Datacom and Japan's NEC have been selected from the shortlist of six companies to deliver on the plan, the West Australian reported. The companies will deliver data centre, server, cloud services, storage and telephony services to all government departments.

Dimension Data, Telstra and IBM were also shortlisted for the project but missed out. The shortlist was drawn up from an initial pool of 56 applicants.

GovNext-ICT is a project aiming to transition the WA government away from owning its own ICT infrastructure and towards an ICT services model. The government plans to consolidate the state's 60-plus government data centres into a small number of high-grade facilities.

The project also aims to migrate government compute and storage capabilities to a public or private cloud and establish a whole-of-government unified network with secure standardised connections to public cloud providers.

According to the report, the proposed contract will have an up to 10-year term and will see Datacom, NEC and Atos subcontracting work to local SMEs. The choice of preferred providers has not been finalised and negotiations are still required. The proposal is expected to be taken to the Cabinet in three or four weeks.

With the GovNext program, the government aims to save up to $650 million over 10 years.

Image courtesy of Daniel Lee under CC