The Department of Health has renewed its IT outsourcing contract with Datacom by three years, bringing the contract's total value to more than $500 million and the tenure to ten years.
Datacom first won the agreement for five years for $242 million through competitive tender, dethroning its predecessor IBM who had been outsourcing the federal agency’s IT services for fifteen years. The contract was then extended in 2020 for two years for $159.7 million. The total contract value has now risen to $506,250,260.60.
The agreement continues the existing IT infrastructure and support deal and adds new capabilities aimed at improving services and driving cost savings, the New Zealand headquartered integrator said in a statement.
Datacom’s chief innovation and technology officer Matthew Gooden said, “our increasing use of AI and automation will speed up the migration of over 1000 production workloads to the public cloud, streamline the release of new applications and deliver improved functionality for Department employees.”
The company said that datacom’s AIOps would use AI-driven insights to enhance the operational delivery of IT services, while up to 80 percent of the agency’s cloud workloads would be automatically provisioned, and a continuous integration, continuous delivery approach would automate aspects of application development and monitoring.
Datacom associate director for customer Nick Brennan said the company would also reduce the agency’s IT helpdesk’s workload by using forms and chat tools to lodge faults and other queries.
The integrator said it had 245 staff rolling out the program and was actively recruiting additional experts in the areas of cloud, networks, automation and service management.
The contract extension caps off a period of work that saw Datacom assist the Department in reconfiguring its IT infrastructure to deal with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This included implementing a remote working solution for approximately 7,500 employees, working with other vendors to set up vaccine management systems, redeploying staff to address the Department’s Covid-related priorities and ramping up its contact centre operations.
Brennan said, “whether it is managing a national vaccine roll out or offering more contact centre support, we are proud of our expertise in delivering health IT infrastructure and services and excited at the prospect of continuing our long-running collaboration with the Department of Health.”
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