NSW data centre plan faces farce phase

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 20 April 2011 08:41

IT Industry - Tenders

Remember Steven Bradbury - the ice skater who won gold when he was the last man standing? Well there's a sense of the Steven Bradburys about the race to supply the NSW Government with its data centres as a key bid member in the Leighton camp has now pulled the plug.

The selection of a partner to build and operate two monster data centres for the NSW State Government has had the hallmarks of high farce for some time as bidder after bidder fell over. Eventually only the Macquarie Capital Group and Leighton Contractors were left in the race for the project that calls for 130 Government data centres to be consolidated into just two.

But Springfield Land Corporation has now confirmed that it, a key part of the Leighton line up, has withdrawn from the race to build a data centre for the NSW Government. Springfield has built the Polaris data centre in Queensland as part of a joint venture with Suncorp and this week announced plans to build a $200 million data centre in Melbourne which will have one of the big banks as anchor tenant.

A spokeswoman for Leighton Contractors said that the company is still bidding for the NSW data centre business but declined to comment on the implications of Springfield's decision to withdraw. Macquarie Capital also declined to comment.

Springfield's managing director Bob Sharpless told iTWire that that while the company is interested in building a data centre in NSW to complement its line up in Victoria and Queensland, it had pulled out of the NSW Government data centre bid because of the 'requirements of the NSW Government.' 

According to a spokesman for the NSW Department of Finance and Service; 'The data centre reform tender (is) active and the Department of Finance and Services will not comment.' He declined to comment on the implications of Springfield's decision to withdraw.

A proposal hatched under the previous Labor Government, the NSW Government data centre programme is part of a plan by the State to consolidate its data centres into just two, but that process has been fraught with controversy. There is now mounting pressure on the NSW Government to abandon the data centre plan and either look at cloud computing or leverage Federal data centre initiatives.

Who else pulled out? Read on