$35m Sydney Trains deal awarded to outsourcer

Sydney Trains has awarded a five-year, $34.9 million deal to Indian IT outsourcer HCL Technologies to maintain and support 107 of the agency’s legacy applications.

Late last year the rail operator went to market for offers to replace a network of 11 different external suppliers which had been supporting and maintaining the suite of customised and bespoke business applications inside the freshly re-branded agency (formerly CityRail).

“These contracts had been in place for varying periods of time and so there was an opportunity to go back to the market and consolidate our approach and vendors,” a Sydney Trains spokesperson told sister publication iTnews.

It marks the first time HCL has partnered with Sydney Trains on this specific program of work.

The spokesperson said while the work would be performed offshore under the new contract, a number of the previous 11 vendors had also been located offshore and used offshore models to support the applications in scope.

The agency said no Sydney Trains staff would be impacted by the change.

The spokesperson would not comment on the privacy and security implications of offshore workers accessing the data residing in the business-critical applications, saying only that “appropriate data and security controls are in place”.

The partnership follows a recommendation from the 2012 NSW Commission Audit, which found 130 corporate systems in use across the transport cluster, and suggested that amount be reduced to between 8 and 24 in order to reap annual savings of $100 million.