Aust govt names cloud supplier panel

The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has selected 35 suppliers for its Data Centre as a Service (DCaaS) panel, which will supply cloud services to selected government agencies for the next two years.

The panel will be called upon to provide over 900 types of services, such as virtual desktops, servers, disaster recovery, online collaboration tools, and managed backups to government agencies, AGIMO's First Assistant Secretary John Sheridan posted on the agency's blog today.

The 35 suppliers consist of many of the top vendors in Australia, including Bulletproof, Datacom, Dell, HP, IBM, Macquarie Telecom, Pacnet, Telstra, TransACT, and UXC. The panel will be open until 2014.

The panel will not offer services that are included as part of other government panels, such as the datacentre facilities and migration panels, the Microsoft volume sourcing arrangement, the internet connection and telecommunications panels, or the gateway reduction program. Contracts given to the panel are limited to AU$80,000 in value, with terms of up to 12 months.

AGIMO indicated that it was seeking suppliers for the panel in late July, and said that interested parties would need to pay an AU$250 fee to have their application processed.

The government refers to the panel as a "multi-use list" in that vendors are still required to tender for contracts.

The announcement comes almost a month after AGIMO released its cloud adoption guide for government agencies. The report recommends agencies to look for "trigger points" for the time to move to cloud-based services, such as when systems are due for replacement or upgrade, or during pilots.