EDS' South Australian account director, Bruce Linn, told ZDNet Australia the outsourcing specialist's existing whole-of-government contract in the state -- signed more than six years ago -- did not mention the Internet at all.
Linn's remarks come as the state government evaluates its options for the future of the contract, which is due to expire in around three years. Some reports indicate the government is expected to make an announcement this month on the outcome of a review of the deal ordered late last year.
State government officials have already indicated their preference for shorter-term, more flexible outsourcing arrangements in future. The government spends more than AU$250 million per year on outsourced information technology and communications.
Linn said "the world had changed dramatically" since the initial deal was signed, due to the advent of different delivery mechanisms and ways of doing business.
These, he said, would be reflected in any new contract signed with the state government. "We would have to be slightly more flexible to take account [of these changes]," he said.
Linn also said the global trend had switched back from piece-meal, short-term outsourcing towards larger deals. He cited as examples Barclays' signing of a seven-year, US$350 million outsourcing deal with EDS in June and ABN-AMRO's decision late last year to award EDS a US$1.3 billion, five-year deal.
He added that the timing of release of a new study commissioned by EDS -- which claims the outsourcing deal has reduced the information and communications technology costs to the state government by tens of millions of dollars -- was "obviously reasonably good".
EDS Australia said in a statement the research -- conducted by the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies -- revealed that costs incurred by the government in the six years to September 2002 were at least AU$64 million less than at the start of the agreement in April 1996.
The SACES said the cost savings were primarily achieved in the key areas of mainframe and wide-area networking. "Unfortunately it is difficult to meaningfully quantify the extent of savings for the remaining IT segments of the agreement -- [local area networking], midrange and workstation segments -- due to changes in technology and the government's requirements during this period.
"However, significant price reductions have still been achieved in all of these segments".
However, once contract management costs and other external factors had been removed, only between AU$13 million and AU$20 million of the quantified savings were directly attributable to the deal.
The report said as well as making an important contribution to the South Australian government, EDS "has also provided substantial economic development benefits to the state and its workforce now numbers in excess of 2,000".
An earlier report by the SACES claimed that the state's economy had been boosted by more than AU$500 million, or nearly 6,000 equivalent full-time jobs, in the first five years of the deal.
The move comes as EDS globally moves to cut around 2,700 jobs globally and sell assets under a rigorous savings program for the current financial year.
Around 9,000 of its 138,000 staff are employed in Australia and New Zealand.
$64 million saved after 7 years?
And that is supposed to compensate for the jobs lost, the reduction in responsiveness, the wage freeze that EDS employees have been on for the last four years (while other government charges have increased), the lack of flow-on to small business and the token rental that EDS pays for their CBD building?
Let's hope that the present government will listen to reason and seriously reevaluate the contract and make a decision that's in the interest of ALL of the SA IT community, not just a mob who work for a US based company.