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Rudd's dept awards ASG $41m deal

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has chosen IT services company ASG to continue to support its core ICT requirements for up to $41 million over a nine year period.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor and  Ben Grubb, Contributor

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has chosen IT services company ASG Group to continue to support its core IT requirements in a deal worth up to $41 million over a nine-year period.

Parliament House

(Parliament House image by Eugene Regis, CC2.0)

ASG is guaranteed $13.66 million, which will be paid for the initial three-year term of the contract, according to ASG's general manager federal region Richard Everett. The department can renew the contract for two further three-year terms.

Under the terms of the contract, ASG will deliver what it said was an "expanded range of services" including service desk, desktop, server/network services and project services.

The contract followed the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet releasing a tender in October last year for core ICT services and telephony management services.

The IT support part of the contract had already been held by ASG prior to the announcement today. It had originally been won by Exceed Systems which became an ASG subsidiary in late 2004. Exceed had signed the contract with the department in March 2004.

The telephony management services portion has been held by Optus since 2004 and was worth $4 million after scope increases. It is not known whether it has been renewed. "Optus doesn't comment on the outcome of customer tenders," the company said in a statement. The department has not yet responded to queries on the matter.

According to the original tender, the core ICT services provider was to deliver IT service desk, ITIL service management, desktop management as well as local area network and server support. The vendor supplying telephony management services was to carry out support services for switchboard, desktop telephony, mobile telephony, teleconference and video-conferencing, wide area connectivity and telephony invoice and billing management.

The department and its affiliated offices and agencies have 1243 desktops, 631 laptops and 175 printers, but only 35 physical servers.

The vendors have to work together with other hardware, software and telephony providers which already provide products to the department. They may also have to plan in the support of the CABNET system which is a system for Cabinet documents, previously supported by the Department of Finance and Deregulation. An upgrade of this system was planned for this year.

Both contracts were set to expire 30 June 2010.

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