Trans-Tasman IT services company Datacom today revealed it would play a key role in helping Lockheed Martin service a mammoth $283 million desktop services deal with the Australian Taxation Office inked this year.
The contract — signed in July this year — represents one of the three major chunks created when the ATO flagged plans in 2007 to break up its comprehensive technology outsourcing deal with EDS (now HP Enterprise Services). It covers the support of desktop PCs and equipment, office machines such as faxes and printers and associated back-end infrastructure. Lockheed Martin will be providing a single point of contact service desk for IT and service management issues under the deal.
According to a statement issued by Datacom this morning, the company will provide service desk services to the deal, under the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) standard.
“We decided to partner and bid with Lockheed Martin on the one contract, which was End User Computing,” said Datacom director Mark McWilliams. “Through the industry consultation rounds, it became pretty clear to the ATO that it needed an umbrella service, which is the Enterprise Service Management Centre, and Datacom is supporting key elements of this delivery engine.”
According to Datacom, one of the concepts that it contributed to the deal was the idea that the overarching contract could be split into two pieces – End User Technology Services – covering the supply and support of all end user technology (including basic network services on the ATO’s local area network) – and an Enterprise Service Management Centre, which handles the actual interaction with end users, managing incidents.
As a result of the deal, Datacom will hire an extra 90 staff that will be split between Sydney and Canberra.
The ATO’s contract was hard fought, with Lockheed beating out a number of traditional IT services firms to win the deal, including big names such as CSC — which was a finalist, incumbent HP Enterprise Services, KAZ (now part of Fujitsu) and Unisys.
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