WA agencies seek IT outsourcer

The Western Australian Departments of Corrective Services and the Attorney General have advertised for a single contractor to manage their IT infrastructure over the next five years.

The departments, which share a common IT function, collectively span 94 sites statewide, servicing 5,200 full-time staff.

The contractor would be expected to provide base services to keep infrastructure up and running, as well as project services for ad-hoc requests. The tender documents considered base services to include help desk, server, desktop, network and security management services as well as enterprise services.

The departments use mainly Wintel server platforms running Microsoft Server 2003 R2. The desktops are mainly Windows XP.

The contractor needed to take the departments' ICT agenda into account, including a plan to migrate as many physical servers as possible to a VMware platform, upgrading the storage area network to avoid a capacity problem, adopting application and desktop virtualisation, undergoing a network redesign and deploying Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007.

Since the departments were standardising on Prince2 and ITIL, the contractor was expected to be familiar with these standards.

Only qualified suppliers under Western Australia's Spirit ICT procurement framework are eligible to tender for the opportunity.