Data#3 scores whole of Australian government Microsoft licensing contract
Data#3 has been handed a Whole of Australian Government (WoAG) contract by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) that will see the local firm be the sole provider of Microsoft licensing solutions.
The contract was tendered for in August, with the federal government also revealing at the time that governments in the country spent over AU$364 million from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2016 on Microsoft licences and software assurance.
The DTA, on behalf of Australian governments, went to market to find one or more Microsoft resellers to appoint to the WoAG Software Licensing and Services Panel for round three of its agreement with Microsoft.
The Microsoft Volume Sourcing Agreement (VSA3) began July 1, 2016 and will wrap up June 30, 2019. Just over a year in, the DTA flagged a need for the services of one or more vendors to provide services to entities participating in the VSA3 arrangement.
The operation of the panel will be reviewed annually by the DTA and may be refreshed or reopened to add additional or different panellists, categories, or deliverables.
The federal government operates a handful of panel agreements, including for datacentre facilities, IT hardware, telecommunications and telecommunications management, and cloud.
The panel agreements form part of a whole-of-government digital strategy created after it was revealed the government was spending over AU$5 billion per year on IT.
To date, the cloud services panel has signed up around 100 preferred vendors, with Data#3, Microsoft, Datacom, IBM, and Macquarie Telecom on the panel.
See also Commonwealth pushes public cloud by default
Data#3 in January announced it would be replacing the Department of Finance's Govdex platform with a cloud-based file-sharing and "community collaboration" solution, chosen by the department after turning to the government's cloud services panel.
The software-as-a-service solution on the public cloud using Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure will set the department back AU$656,524.
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