blog Those of you with long memories will recall that the Federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship has contracted IT services giant Unisys to provide desktop support services to the department since 2007. Unisys this morning announced that it had won an open tender to retain the work through to at last mid-2018, at a value of $104.1 million. Some key paragraphs from the media release:
Under the contract, awarded following an open tender process, Unisys will continue to provide managed service desk and end user computing services to DIAC through June 2018. The contract includes an expanded scope to provide infrastructure support for the department’s midrange equipment and storage. The contract value is estimated at approximately AUD$104.1 million (USD$109 million) over the five year term.
“We continue to provide high levels of service and support to DIAC staff to allow them to focus on their mission of managing people migrating to Australia, promoting Australian citizenship, protecting and supporting refugees and helping to secure our nation’s borders,” said Scott Whyman, vice president and general manager, Global Managed Services Asia Pacific for Unisys.
In the last two years the department’s IT needs have evolved due to increased mobility in the workplace, the need to share data securely, and whole-of-government procurement initiatives. In response, DIAC and Unisys have worked closely to deliver a number of significant programs including: Consolidation of the department’s five data centres into two; Procurement of more than 7,000 end user devices; Roll out of the Microsoft Windows 7 environment to all end users; and design and implementation of security measures to enable secure emailing, editing and storage of material with a Protected level security classification.
Unisys currently provides services for more than 8,000 DIAC staff nationally, as well as staff in more than 60 locations overseas, handling approximately 25,000 calls per month. Prior to Unisys operating the service desk, there was no single point of contact for IT related issues. Unisys has now increased the proportion of first call resolutions by the service desk, improving customer satisfaction and effectiveness. Unisys has also helped the department improve web site performance and reduce spam email.
It’s not clear at this point which other suppliers competed for the work, but we would expect that list of names to include Fujitsu and IBM as a bare minimum. This is a nice win for Unisys, and it’s also worth noting that the company appears to have nabbed DIAC’s mid-range server support also as part of the package. This area was previously held by CSC, under a contract due to expire this year. We’re sure CSC won’t be happy to see it handed off to Unisys.
Image credit: Ante Vekic, royalty free
“infrastructure support” is apparently only part of the midrange work – DIAC have actually in-sourced midrange from CSC, hiring staff.
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