Noosa Council commits AU$1.2m to cloud technology
Noosa Council has signed an enterprise software as a service deal with TechnologyOne worth approximately AU$1.2 million in initial licensing and service, and $1 million per annum thereafter.
The council, which de-amalgamated from the Sunshine Coast Regional Council (SCRC) on 1 January 2014, implemented TechnologyOne's OneCouncil solution that runs on the TechnologyOne Cloud in January.
The OneCouncil solution, which was designed in collaboration with 250 councils, is a single platform solution that integrates operations from land and property management, and finance and regulatory functions, through to payroll and human resource management.
As part of the deal, TechnologyOne's Application Management Services team will also provide ongoing solution management and administration, as there are only five full-time IT staff from the 400 employees that transferred from the SCRC.
As a preconfigured solution, Noosa Council CEO Brett de Chastel said with OneCouncil, the council has been able to reduce time, risk, and costs, such as capital expenditure, depreciation, and in-house IT staffing costs.
"It is difficult enough to run a council without worrying about ageing servers, downtime and disaster recovery. None of this is our core business, so it makes perfect sense to outsource all of that to an expert while the council gets on with serving the Noosa community," he said.
"This total solution and embedded business processes mean we have removed a huge amount of complexity from the transfer process, prepared ourselves for the future and saved millions of dollars."
Initial estimates guided by a KPMG cost analysis, conducted on behalf of the Queensland Treasury Corporation, showed that the capital expenditure on this sort of IT setup to be approximately AU$5 million, with an annual operating cost of AU$3.6 million.
De Chastel said other reasons why TechnologyOne won over six other providers was because of a watertight service level agreement, which guarantees 99 per cent access every month; a 'highly available' environment, meaning that every transaction is updating two mirrored databases simultaneously in two separate data centres; and response times are already proving faster than the SCRC in-house system.
TechnologyOne also said it would have typically taken 12-18 months for an outdated technology model to be implemented, but the execution of the Noosa Council project took only four months.
TechnologyOne executive chairman Adrian Di Marco said by choosing to go into the cloud, the burden, and complexities of running or updating software and infrastructure is eliminated.
"By removing the burden of managing their computing environment, we enable them to focus on running their business," he said.
Winning this agreement is part of TechologyOne's AU$80 million investment to create a cloud offering to help its customers amplify their computing model, reduce costs, and improve productivity.