News - Monday, July 19, 2010 13:04 - 1 Comment

Lockheed Martin wins ATO desktop deal

The Australian Taxation Office has awarded Lockheed Martin – a US technology giant more known for its strengths in the construction of fighter jets and missiles than in enterprise IT services – preferred tenderer status for a contract estimated at $60 million a year for the provision of desktop PC and other end-user computing services.

In a statement issued late Friday, the ATO said it had determined that Lockheed’s bid for its end user computing services contract offered “the best value for money outcome” for the agency.

Lockheed beat out a number of traditional enterprise IT services firms to win the deal, including big names such as CSC – which was a finalist – incumbent HP Enterprise Services (formerly EDS), KAZ (now part of Fujitsu) and Unisys.

Lockheed is not known to have won other large desktop support deals in Australia in recent times, although it does have an IT services arm that operates internationally.

The contract encompasses the provision of support to desktop PCs and equipment, offices machines such as faxes and printers and associated back-end infrastructure. A service management centre – including a single point of contact service desk for IT and service management issues – will be provided to the ATO.

The ATO said that it would now enter into negotiations with Lockheed to finalise the contract, with the outcome expected to be announced in August this year.

Although tasty for Lockheed, the deal is just one part of the ATO’s technology sandwich. In late 2007 the agency revealed it would break its mammoth IT outsourcing arrangement with EDS into chunks. Today’s announcement brings the end user computing chunk closer to being finalised.

Optus beat Dimension Data to win the managed network services portion of the ATO’s pie in May 2009 – with that deal also being worth around $60 million a year, while HP Enterprise Services and IBM are still fighting it out to win the ATO’s centralized computing contract.

“The Request for Tender (RFT) for the third services bundle, Centralised Computing Services is currently under evaluation with two short-listed organisations announced in June 2010,” the ATO said today.

Image credit: Kenn Kiser, royalty free