Optus beats Telstra to lucrative $60m a year ATO deal

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 26 May 2009 02:36

IT Industry - Strategy

Optus is in the final stages of inking a lucrative managed telecoms services contract with the Australian Tax Office worth more than $60 million a year. Optus beat three other companies including Telstra in a tender race that has been in progress for the past 8 months.

Four companies had been selected to proceed to the request for tender stage of the MNS process after it was issued in October 2008. They were Dimension Data, Computer Sciences Corporation, Optus and Telstra.

The two finalists were Optus and Dimension Data.

According to the ATO, Optus will be service provider for the first of the three ICT outsourced service bundles— managed network services (MNS).

The MNS bundle includes the provision of data and voice carriage services, telephony services, wide area network and local area network services, video conferencing services, and call centre infrastructure and services.

The Tax Office currently spends approximately $60.5 million a year on these services.

Second Commissioner David Butler said the Tax Office’s objective is to achieve a value for money, business focused outcome from the arrangements for its managed network services.

“We expect to complete our contract negotiations in the coming weeks and will provide more information on the contract after that point,” Mr Butler said.

The two other bundles that will be available for ICT providers are either undergoing the tender process or the tender will soon be announced.

End user computing – the request for tender closed on 11 May 2009. A contract is expected to be in place by March 2010.

Centralised computing – the Tax Office expects to release the request for tender in July 2009 with a contract expected to be in place by mid-2010.