Ministry for Primary Industries appoints IT panel

Fujitsu to provide IT managed services to ministry - Unisys ousted

Fujitsu, Datacom and Gen-i have been appointed to a panel to provide IT managed services for government agencies and the first to take up a contract under the arrangement is the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).

MPI has contracted with Fujitsu for the services, ousting Unisys, the previous supplier of ICT managed services for what was formerly the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Unisys has also missed out on the syndicated procurement deal for which MPI acted as the lead agency.

Unisys bid to be a member of the panel but did not make it through the due diligence process, conducted late last year, says Nigel Prince, MPI’s deputy director-general of corporate services. It fell short on a combination of factors including service-level agreements and pricing, he says.

Fujitsu will begin delivering MPI’s managed services from November 1 on a four-year contract with an option to renew for an additional three years.

Under the agreement, Fujitsu will provide service desk support, user device support, service aggregation, server support, service delivery management and other IT services.

The ministry says its corporate services department will work closely with Unisys and Fujitsu to plan the transition to the new IT service arrangements. It says it will be business as usual during the change-over and that there should be no impact on IT services.

Revera will be the Ministry’s infrastructure provider under the all-of government IaaS arrangement concluded last year. (Computerworld, October 25, 2011) TelstraClear and one.govt will provide networking.

The syndicated agreement is intended to provide service to government agencies that already use service aggregation – also known as multi-sourced integration - as their ICT operating model, and those that intend to progress towards this model.

The value and other commercial details of the agreement will not be released. The new procurement model aims at “significant efficiencies gained through the standardisation of IT environments and the economies of scale from the adoption of IT managed services by individual agencies and for the NZ government as a whole,” says an official announcement.