So easy for winner of $1.3b govt outsourcing deal-Singapore
EDS-led team clinches contract that could save govt $500m over 8 years
By AMIT ROY CHOUDHURY
(SINGAPORE) The government yesterday ended the suspense over its mega outsourcing deal and announced that the One Meridian consortium, led by IT services company EDS International, has won the eight-year contract to manage the public sector’s front-end computer network comprising around 60,000 computers.
The $1.3 billion, eight-year tender, called Standard Operating Environment (SOE) - and renamed SOEasy (Public Sector) - was awarded some three years after the idea was first announced.
One Meridian’s proposal was the best and that’s why it emerged the winner, Lim Hup Seng, deputy secretary (performance) of the Ministry of Finance, noted yesterday.
The One Meridian consortium comprises, apart from EDS, Singapore Computer Systems (SCS), Frontline Technologies, Fuji Xerox, Avanade, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Microsoft and Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel).
Its victory startled some industry watchers who had installed two other consortia as favourites to bag the SOE deal.
One Team, led by NCS and including IBM, and iN’spire, led by Hewlett-Packard (HP) and including local firm ST Electronics, were widely thought to be in the best position to win. This was mainly on account of the fact that HP and IBM are two of the biggest IT companies in the world. BT had reported earlier this week that some internal differences had cropped up in the One Team consortium.
Mr Lim said that the initiative would bring about $500 million in cost savings for the government over the lifetime of the project.
He added that the tender would run for eight years and the first 17 government agencies with full SOE implementation will be up and running by July 1, 2009. Full implementation would be by 2010.
Once deployed the SOE would serve 60,000 public officers and would cover 74 government agencies with offices in more than 800 locations.
The SOE contract excludes the Ministry of Defence, polytechnics and Institutes of Technical Education as well as all schools under the Ministry of Education.
The race to clinch the deal - NexGenea, comprising Japanese giant NEC and US-based Computer Science Corporation, was the other player in the fray - was closely watched by the IT industry globally.
This is because for the first time the front-end computer network, across different departments and ministries of a government, is being outsourced to an outside vendor. If successful, SOE could trigger copycat implementations across the world, according to industry watchers.
Mr Lim pointed out that SOE was just the start of the government’s efforts to outsource its front-end IT needs.
One initiative that is already in the planning stage is the 100,000-seat Ministry of Education project for all the schools under it. Preliminary evaluation on this has started.
Pauline Tan, senior director, government chief information office, and the SOE programme director, said the contract will consolidate infocomm services into a single environment which will allow government agencies to achieve greater efficiency in infocomm usage and cost savings.
‘This involves harmonising desktop, messaging and network environments across all government agencies,’ she said.
She added that agencies can then fully utilise and benefit from integrated infocomm services and allocate resources optimally, resulting in operational efficiency that will bring about the $500 million cost savings to the government over the eight-year period of the contract.
‘This translates to an average of 28 per cent over current infocomm expenditure for equivalent services,’ she said.
Stephen Yeo, EDS’ South-east Asia executive director, noted that the One Meridian consortium represents ‘a comprehensive, leading-edge approach that will help create an agile work environment across the entire breadth of the Singapore government’.
Mr Yeo also noted that the project is economically viable. ‘If we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t be on this … and I think to the government’s credit, it knows that this has to be economically viable for whoever is going to win.’
Source : Business Times - 29 Feb 2008
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