Australian Government chief technology officer, John Sheridan.
The list of suppliers on the Federal Government’s cloud services panel continues to grow, with Ajilon and Inspired Apps among the latest round of additions to the procurement arrangement.
Australian Government Chief Technology Officer, John Sheridan, named the latest entrants to the panel on 16 March, bringing the total number of suppliers on the panel up to 175.
The latest round includes Message Stick Communications, Network Synergy Corporation and Business Information Systems, in addition to Inspired Apps and Ajilon Australia – the latter of which claims a workforce of more than 1000 consultants across multiple sectors.
“All new Panellists will be submitting services for inclusion on the Cloud Services Panel Service Catalogue shortly,” said Sheridan. “These services will soon be available for Agencies to procure via the ICT Procurement Portal.”
Ajilon’s appointment to the panel comes just months after the company was handed a multi-year change management contract by the Western Australian Department of Training and Workforce Development slated to be worth in excess of $3.4 million.
Sheridan named 11 new panelists in early March, with the Citadel Group and Axios Systems among those welcomed into the rapidly expanding club of local IT services providers that have been added to the panel.
In mid-February, seven new inductees to the panel were named, including Qualtrics, Axalon and QAL Technologies.
Earlier in February, the government welcomed 12 new panellists, including Fujitsu, Teradata Australia, and Ricoh Australia, which joined other tech heavyweights, such as Cisco, Data#3, iiNet, IBM and Dimension Data that were already on the panel.
The Department of Finance established the whole-of-government cloud services panel in January 2015. The procurement panel arrangement’s current standing offer runs from 30 January 2015 to 31 March 2018.
The aim of the panel arrangement is to offer public agencies a “scalable and flexible cloud services via industry offerings and do so in a way that reduces the burden on industry,” according to Sheridan.
It covers platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service, along with services such as cloud service optimisation and integration.
The cloud services panel approach to market was conducted in June 2016, according to the Department of Finance, which claims jurisdiction over the panel. The Department anticipates that the panel will be refreshed in 12-18 months' time, depending on demand.
