Dell Australia has won a $6 million server and network storage contract from the Department of Human Services (DHS).
The deal, which runs from the end of April to the end of June, sees Dell provide servers to “enhance the DHS applications' monitoring capability,” a Department of Human Services spokesperson told ARN.
The contract was won via an open tender process via the Department’s Computer X86 Servers and Associated Services procurement panel, which was established prior to Dell’s acquisition of EMC and the subsequent name change to Dell EMC.
The panel also counts Dimension Data, Hewlett-Packard Australia, IBM Australia, Fujitsu Australia and Datacom Systems as fellow suppliers.
While the contract comes as the Department is in the midst of its billion-dollar welfare payments system overhaul, the spokesperson said Dell’s server deal is not connected to a broader IT project.
Thanks, in part, to the landmark welfare payments system overhaul, the Department of Human Services has become a prominent spender in the local IT landscape.
In March, it announced that it had handed a $5.14 million, three-year contract, to Canberra IT services provider, Forward IT.
Under the terms of the deal, Forward IT will provide PCs for the delivery of the Department’s services, according to a spokesperson for the Department, with the contract set to extend until January 2020.
While both Forward IT and the Federal Government have remained tight-lipped about the vendor, or vendors, from which the PCs will be sourced, the Belconnen-based IT supplier is a Dell Certified Premier Partner, a Dell Enterprise Storage Partner, and an HP Education and Government Partner.
However, the Department has made headlines recently largely thanks to the leviathan overhaul of its ageing welfare payments system, in a multi-year project that is pegged to cost upward of $1 billion.
Late last year, IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) were added to the Government’s panel of IT service providers that will undertake the billion-dollar overhaul of the Centrelink payments IT system, joining Accenture and Capgemini on the panel.
In March, Accenture was ultimately named as the as the preferred supplier to provide system integration services for the next phase of the project.
The Department is also supporting the Department of Health’s replacement of the 30-year-old IT system it uses to deliver health, aged care and veterans’ payments.
According to the government’s Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), handed down by Treasurer, Scott Morrison, on 19 December, $29.7 million of initial funding has been allocated to the Department of Health, while $1.7 million will be put into the Department of Human Services for the project.
