Incumbent telecommunications suppliers Telstra and Optus have been put on notice as the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) plans to unleash a tender for AU$4.5 million worth of telco services and products.
The agency will soon have two major deals on tender -- for mobile telephony and wide area network services. The arrangements are respectively worth AU$1 million and AU$3 million, and currently held separately by Telstra and Optus.
Also on the shopping list are firewall wide area network accelerator products and load testing services.
The bureau had initially planned a further AU$9.4 million worth of telecommunications services for tender late in 2006, however, it instead opted to continue to buy voice and communications hardware maintenance and supply services from existing suppliers.
"The ABS has elected to utilise extensions of existing arrangements as the ABS considered that this approach represented best value for money at this time," a spokesperson for the bureau told ZDNet Australia. "Further consideration will be given to the best time to market test these services in the future."
The bureau has also extended its relationship with an unnamed existing supplier of Microsoft software licences, abandoning a planned AU$1.5 million approach to the market.
According to the government's contracts disclosure system, the ABS has purchased services from large telcos AT&T, Optus and Telstra in the past 12 months, and network systems integrators Data#3, Commander and Dimension Data.
View from the sidelines
Dr Steve Hodgkinson, research director of analyst firm Ovum's government division and former deputy chief information officer of Victoria, said Telstra's scale gave it an advantage in public sector purchasing.
"At the end of the day, Telstra does have a big incumbent advantage, in terms of many aspects of its value proposition," he said. "That's kind of undeniable, when you're looking at big scale, mission-critical stuff."
Hodgkinson said he was aware of several large telecommunications procurement initiatives that had re-selected Telstra after exhaustive evaluation of the market. However, he said governments were still exhaustively testing the market to get the best deals from telcos from both a value for money and quality of service perspective.
One example is the Tasmanian state government, which recently retained Telstra for a whole-of-government data networking deal worth around AU$30 million.
Hodgkinson said there was a trend towards public sector buyers getting the upper hand over telcos through the use of such aggregated buying power. This trend could particularly be seen at a state level, he said, with federal government departments still primarily buying services individually.
But Telstra hasn't always won out in recent times. For example, the Victorian state government ignored Telstra when it recently handed a whole-of-government Internet services panel contract to Pacific Internet, Optus, Eftel and Netspace.
