Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry seeks partners for ICT modernisation

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) is seeking partners to modernise its ICT capabilities.

DAFF has released three tenders in the past month as part of its new ICT Strategic Sourcing Program launched in June.

The program comes after DAFF launched a review of how it sources and provides ICT services to internal functions and as shared services.

"It's been over a decade since the department engaged with the technology market to understand current opportunities, contemporary capabilities and practices," DAFF CIO Mark Sawade said in June.

“Many of our major ICT service arrangements will expire over the coming 18 months, so it is timely for us to approach the market via the RFT process to understand what opportunities are available."

In a tender, DAFF said it is looking for a partner to provide hybrid compute and storage services.

These services will entail the management and support of on-premise and public cloud compute and storage, including midrange, middleware, database, backup, archive and related services, as well as client side management of data centres.

DAFF is also looking for a partner to provide end user productivity and service desk services through a separate tender.

Services will entail the management and support of end user devices, as well as services and applications including directory services, remote access, Microsoft 365, virtual desktop infrastructure, field and VIP services, unified communication services and service desk functions.

In another tender, DAFF is seeking service providers to deliver managed network services.

This will entail the management and support of network devices required to connect end users with digital and collaboration services across all network domains.

The tenders represent the second tranche of services required by the ICT Strategic Sourcing Program, with service delivery expected to begin in October 2024.

The tender for the first tranche, which called for enterprise service management services, has now closed.

The third tranche will involve telecommunication services as well as ICT and digital staff augmentation services.