Fujitsu, Kinetic IT take Canberra spending crown

CRN has gone back to Canberra, again sifting through the federal government's tender records to figure out which partners and vendors got the lion's share of federal funds.

Our first effort covered all of 2018 and can be read here. 

As always, our results aren't necessarily definitive as AusTender doesn't publish every contract in a timely manner or use the same business name for each contract.

Nevertheless, we are confident that these figures will provide a useful depiction of the biggest winners in Canberra for Q1 2019.

The first three months of 2019 reflect a difficult buying season, as a looming election changes buying behavior. The earlier-than-usual budget may also have delayed some deals, as agencies waited to learn how much cash they would have on hand in fiscal 19/20. 

Let's start with the partners:

There were two standout winners this quarter: Fujitsu and Kinetic IT, mostly thanks to massive contracts the pair won from the Department of Defence.

In January, Defence awarded three end-user support contracts, the biggest going to Fujitsu for providing national deskside support services worth $99.2 million, and two separate contracts to Kinetic IT for ICT service desk and service integration management services worth a combined $91.4 million.

Fujitsu continued racking up more contract wins over the quarter, bringing its total contract wins to $109 million.

The Defence deals put Fujitsu and Kinetic IT ahead of Australia's largest IT providers, most notably the companies starting with the letter 'D'.

2018's biggest winner, Data#3, came in third this time with $32 million, followed by DXC with $22.4 million, Dimension Data with $13.6 million and DXC Connect with $10.3 million, while Datacom made just under $2 million from government contracts.

One name to watch out for is Queensland-based Baidam Solutions, which picked up a $1.4 million contract to roll out a LogRhythm SIEM solution from the Department of Jobs and Small Business.

Now on to the vendors:

The vendor list shouldn't come as a surprise to readers given the government's penchant for buying kit from Dell EMC.

IBM was the biggest winner in 2018 and although the company only netted $4.5 million in deals this quarter, there were plenty of other partners winning work from IBM products, such as Datacom, Meridian IT and Bistech.

After publishing the latest roundup, we were asked how the 'Big Four' consultancies fare in Canberra, given they deliver a lot of technology-led projects on top of their financial services. It can be difficult to discern which contracts are actually tech related, but we've had a crack with the following results:

Much like Fujitsu and Kinetic IT, PWC pulled out in front with a contract with the Department of Defence for "acquisition and capability development" for the project management office worth $14 million.

Methodology

We’ve used the AusTender website’s record of all government contracts awarded between 1 January and 31 March, 2019, across four categories of deals most likely to record IT spend. Those four categories are information technology broadcasting and telecommunications; domestic appliances and supplies and consumer electronic products; electronic components and supplies; and engineering and research and technology-based services. Then we did the math, added up the value of contracts and compiled them into a list.