Framing a 20-year ICT strategy for Melbourne Airport

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 25 October 2009 12:52

IT Industry - Deals

IT services company, The Frame Group, has just completed a 20-year ICT infrastructure plan for Melbourne Airport, which the owners of the airport, Australia Pacific Airports Corporation, claim will help airlines operating at the airport improve their on-time performance, reduce capital and start-up costs and enable new passenger services.

APAC says it commissioned the project with The Frame Group to “identify how ICT can best support the airport's 20-year capital development plan, and that, while security, reliability and scalability are natural concerns for the airport, other requirements of the plan included compliance with global standards, cost containment, and risk management and mitigation.

According to APAC’s Melbourne Airport IT manager, Mark Funston, ICT is a major part of the airport's day-to-day operations, and it will “become increasingly important as we support the business with additional services. What we are doing now is investing in the core to provide better services for the airlines, our tenants, our operations and for the passengers who use our terminals.”

Funston said a key requirement of the strategy was to identify how to consolidate ICT services across tenants and airlines in order to reduce the cost of operating at Melbourne Airport and, he says, to do this, Frame developed an enterprise service provider (ESP) framework: putting the focus on managing services (like wireless and email) rather than their infrastructure components in isolation (servers, routers). 

“The model supports the organisation’s desire to consolidate and centralise business functions.  And with the accompanying financial model, the airport is able to attribute costs to services and to normalise capital expenditure with operations expenditure.

Funston said the project required preparation of detailed short-term and 10-year action plans, plus a high-level 20-year outlook, and the ICT strategy was distilled into four separate strategic plans covering: data centre, network and systems infrastructure, applications and disaster planning.

Frame says the development of the ICT strategy for Melbourne Airport builds on its existing relationship with the airport, where it has been engaged in a series of projects relating to the design and deployment of a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) carrier-grade network for the airport's $330 million international terminal upgrade.
 
The services firm says that the network will connect new outbound international passenger security and Customs processing zones, additional international baggage capabilities, a redesigned passenger concourse and aircraft parking bays, with a range of services such as wireless, flight information displays, TV over IP, unified communications and building management systems.