Southern Cross secures Tabcorp IT deal

Betting giant Tabcorp has appointed systems integrator Southern Cross Computer Systems to supply and support its workplace IT in a five-year, multi-million dollar contract.

SCCS will support Tabcorp’s end-user devices in a Windows 7 environment and supply the company with HP notebooks and desktops. The company declined to provide the specific dollar value of the deal.

“We’re rolling out a new SOE on their devices and providing support for that. So whether a new app needs to be loaded, or they relocate to a new location, we’re responsible for ensuring an efficient transition in that environment,” managing director Mark Kalmus told CRN.

The win is one of several this year that forced SCCS to open a Sydney branch to support the new contract wins, adding to its Perth, Canberra and Melbourne offices.

In October SCCS signed a five-year, $10 million managed services deal with the Victorian Department of Education.

It is also involved in the Victorian Government's eServices panel, and recently renewed a managed services contract with the Public Records Office of Victoria for two years. It had been providing backend managed services and support there for two years.

Kalmus said two more large contracts were in the process of being signed.

“In managed services it’s been a good year for us. The product side is hurting like everyone else, but we’re starting to reap the reward of investing in network operations. You’ve still got to win the business though," he said.

“We’ll probably start to see the return in the second half of this financial year, because right now we’re investing in projects and people, so not seeing the return straight away."

SCCS will apportion several of its 25 new staff members, brought on in a hiring blitz, towards the Tabcorp contract.

The integrator invested heavily in staff this year, reacting to the shift towards cloud computing and the different ways organisations are choosing to buy technology, bringing its headcount to 130 despite a less-than-stellar fiscal 2012. 

SCCS this year ended a five-year run of 20 percent growth year-on-year, reporting an 8 percent jump in revenue and flat net profit.

The private company declined to provide specific sales figures, but said its services business experienced a significant increase while the product side of the business was flat.

SCCS's new $6 million Melbourne-based innovation centre, launched in September, will provide proof of concept testing for several Tabcorp devices, as the company considers new smartphone technology.

The innovation centre offers customers the ability to test back-end infrastructure solutions and end-user hardware via virtualisation technologies from the likes of Citrix.

“One one side of the street we’ve got back-end infrastructure in place, we’ve got a fibre link underneath, and on the other end we’ve got desktops and and mobile device management and IP surveillance technologies etc,” Kalmus said.

“One of the main thing we’ve done is run a proof of concept for [financial services company] IOOF around their IT risk and governance compliance needs, and after a couple of months customising that, they went into production with it. That’s good practical use of the innovation centre.”