New South Wales has signed new whole-of-government telephony deals with Telstra, Optus, AAPT and Macquarie Telecom as part of the state's attempt to cut down its annual AU$260 million telecommunications spend.
Telstra, Optus and AAPT are the nation's largest three telcos, with Macquarie Telecom a smaller specialist focused on government and business work. Under the new arrangements, NSW departments and agencies will now go to one or more of the four when they initiate procurement of fixed-line and mobile telephony services over the next few years, instead of issuing their own separate tenders.
NSW also expects to award contracts for other telecommunications services -- such as PABX systems, conferencing, handsets, managed phone and some data services -- by the middle of 2007.
In a statement announcing the deals, new NSW Commerce Minister Eric Roozendaal claimed the new arrangements would save the state some AU$50 million a year from 2007/2008 onwards, and improve front-line service delivery.
"The government has used its purchasing power to achieve the best possible prices and level of service for all government agencies -- regardless of their size or location," said Roozendaal. "Many agencies will benefit from savings of more than 30 percent on the cost of a standard fixed-line call."
A number of other smaller local telcos missed out on the work. Commander, Globalstar, Hutchison, Message Stick, NEC, Nexon, SP Telemedia, Verizon and Vodafone were all part of the official tendering process.
NSW is not alone in claiming it could save money by keeping the nation's largest telcos on its supplier list.
For example, last week the Tasmanian state government said it was confident it could deliver savings to its departments through a new AU$30 million whole of government deal on Internet and data services, despite awarding the contract to its incumbent supplier Telstra.
Several weeks ago, the Victorian state government awarded a similar Internet services contract. However, Telstra missed out on that work, which went to a number of smaller players as well as Optus.
The new contracts are part of the NSW government's People First strategic ICT procurement initiative. The strategy -- being driven out of the office of the NSW state chief information officer Paul Edgecumbe -- aims to leverage whole-of-government purchasing power to drive prices down.
NSW is also expected to shortly announce a similar contract for desktop, laptop and server hardware.
